During a short break in the work of the Inter-Council Presence, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department of External Church Relations and permanent member of the Holy Synod, answered a question from Deacon Andrei Psarev, the editor of this website:
Vladyka, how can the ROCOR make a positive contribution to the Russian Church as a whole?
Metr. Hilarion at a luncheon with members of ROCOR canonization committee in Moscow on November 19, 2014
Well, above all I have to express the joy, which accompanies all my encounters with the clergy, bishops, and laity of the Church Abroad because this is the joy of recaptured fellowship. Despite the time passed since 2007, [this joy] does not diminish. And we rejoice in the opportunity to engage with our brethren in the Church Abroad. We especially rejoice, of course, in every opportunity to concelebrate – in joint prayer and joint Communion, because over the course of really 80 years we weredeprived of this. And I think that the Russian Church Abroad brings her important and weighty contribution now to the development of our church life, because many traditions have been preserved in the Russian diaspora that were preserved to a lesser degree in some other parts of our Church. And I think that ROCOR’s experience of service in heterodox surroundings, in difficult and cramped conditions, of course, substantially enriches our whole Church.
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Metropolitan Hilarion, “Russian Orthodox Church the absent player at Pope-Patriarch Jerusalem summit,” http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2014/05/19/russian-orthodox-church-the-absent-player-at-pope-patriarch-jerusalem-summit/ (May 16, 2015)
Aha, this is the solution from side of the Sergianists (Alfeyev):”…because many traditions (sic!) have been observed in the Russian diaspora that were preserved to a lesser degree in some other parts of our Church.”
Exactly ten years ago the selfsame Metropolitan was forbidding Russians from the former Soviet Union to attend our ROCOR church in England. Naturally, they ignored him. Therefore I take his present comments as an act of repentance on his part for his past errors.