Ecumenism: Tallinn, 30 communicators at CEC Assembly. War in Ukraine, “hate speech and revenge spreading among children”

The Assembly of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) in Tallinn is being attended and covered by some thirty journalists, video producers, photographers, experts in media relations and social media from different Churches, who are publishing daily Facebook and Twitter posts, photos, videos, and press releases. The theme of the works, which began on 14 June and will end tomorrow, 20 June, is “Under God’s blessing – shaping the future”. Today, Metropolitan Stephanos of Tallinn and all Estonia addressed the participants, greeting them and calling for “Churches to be places of humility, dialogue and love”. He expressed the hope that the work of the Assembly would help to understand how “to create the conditions for our contemporaries who show total indifference to faith to have a true encounter with the Gospel”. The issue of secularisation also emerged at a round table with the leaders of the Ukrainian Christian Churches on the theme of war: “calling Ukraine Orthodox or Christian is a wishful thinking”, said Bishop Pavlo Schwartz of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ukraine; this means that “talking about forgiveness with a traumatised, lay person will be the greatest challenge”. There is also concern about “the hate speech and revenge that the war has unleashed, which is now spreading among children”, said Volodymyr Bureha, vice-rector of the Orthodox Theological Academy in Kyiv, who said: “The Churches must provide an answer to the question of how to remain Christians in this hell”.
Sarah Numico