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Medvedev cancels trip after patriarch's death

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-06 08:05

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev (left) shakes hands with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on Friday. [Agencies]

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will cancel a planned trip to Italy after the death of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexiy II on Friday and return straight to Moscow from a visit to India, his spokeswoman said.

"Today the president had a telephone conversation with the Italian president. In connection with the death of the Patriarch, it was decided that celebrations devoted to handing over a religious centre in Bari to the Russian Orthodox Church will be postponed," spokeswoman Natalya Timakova told reporters.

"The president will return to Moscow today after ending his official visit to India."

Alexiy II, who revived the nation's main religion and healed an 80-year rift with a branch of the Russian Orthodox church in the West, died on Friday. He was 79.

Enthroned in 1990 a year before the Soviet Union's collapse, Estonian-born Alexiy II was relieved of the state ideological control that weighed on his predecessor in the ancient chambers of Moscow's Danilovsky Monastery.

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Alexiy II leads a service in Moscow in this January 25, 2007 file photo. [Agencies]

But the former bishop of Tallinn and Estonia struggled with many of the same problems that worried Russia's politicians - separatist tendencies, schisms and an influx of competing beliefs from the West.

In one of his biggest achievements, the patriarch signed a pact in May 2007 with Metropolitan Laurus, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, ending an 80-year split begun by White Russians who fled Soviet Russia to set up a rival faction.

But he was also criticised for supporting measures to restrict the freedom of other confessions, including Roman Catholics, to work in Russia.

He stood in the way of a visit to Russia by the Polish-born former leader of the Catholic church, Pope John Paul II.

And although he expressed similar views on same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion as Pope Benedict XVI, this never resulted in a meeting.

Addressing the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe last year, Alexiy II denounced homosexuality as a sin, an illness and "a distortion of the human personality like kleptomania".