Atheists “aggressively” promote their ideas and are attempting to rule over the world’s “religious majority,” the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, told Romanian Q Magazine ahead of his visit to Bucharest.

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Kirill is currently on visit in Romania, where he, alongside bishops from Albania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, joined a service celebrating 10 years since the election of Patriarch Daniel as head of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Speaking to Q Magazine on the eve of his arrival to Bucharest, Kirill said the number of atheists is growing in some countries, usually with high levels of consumption, but their total number is extremely low.

“It's another matter that atheistic ideas are often aggressively propagandized in the public sphere. In that case, atheists and radical secularism supporters are making persistent attempts to ideologically dominate the religious majority of our planet,” the patriarch said.

He noted that the number of believers in Russia and other Eastern European, as well as in Latin America and Arab, countries is rising. During a Friday service, the patriarch warned of emerging “political and religious false teachers,” who promise heaven on Earth without God.

Kirill said that the history of the 20th century showed that such “misbeliefs” led to the “terrible statewide experiment,” from which the Orthodox Church suffered.