Rio de Janeiro, February 20, Interfax - Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has called on Orthodox Christians and Catholics to join efforts in the fight against the ousting of Christian values.

“We still have some doctrinal disagreements, but no one is preventing us from fighting, hand in hand, to end the persecutions, the ousting of Christian values, to end the de-Christianization of the 21st century human civilization,” the patriarch said, after conducting a prayer service near the Jesus Christ statue on Mount Corcovado, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the world’s largest Catholic country, on Saturday.

All travelers, especially seafarers, know, and not so much these days as they did in the days when the Americas were being discovered: when the human ability to weather a storm or other hardships runs out, there is always hope for the power of God, the Russian Church leader said.

Today, many Christians are being killed in the Middle East and Africa, their churches and monasteries are being destroyed, and whole settlements and towns of believers are being exterminated, all the while, the global community has been unable to work out joint approaches on how to combat terrorism, and “very often attempts to defeat terrorism involve the attaining of other ends far from this declared goal,” thus instilling “the fear of a greater war.”