On September 7, 2025, a large-scale procession devoted to the Council of Moscow Saints was held within the Russian capital, headed personally by Russian Patriarch Kirill. The procession was additionally conceived as a central occasion for the secular vacation of Moscow Day, and this yr the 2 holidays coincided.
The procession began from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and reached the Novodevichy Stavropegial Monastery – this can be a new route, as a result of neither in fashionable occasions nor prior to now have liturgical processions handed alongside it. Nevertheless, the patriarch known as the route historic and stated that “a exceptional non secular custom interrupted by the God-fighters, who briefly enslaved our nation,” is being revived. The route was seven kilometers, and the church media didn’t fail to emphasise the bodily endurance of the patriarch in opposition to the background of rumors about his deteriorating well being: “The patriarch confirmed glorious bodily form,” Orthodox-patriotic sources write. However, the patriarch coated a lot of the route by automotive. About 40,000 believers from all parishes of the capital took half within the occasion. An identical procession of this scale has not been held within the Russian capital for ten years. The final one happened in 2015, when greater than 10,000 folks, led by the patriarch, walked from the Kremlin to the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, carrying the icon of St. Peter, the Moscow Wonderworker (the saint lived in 13-14 AD and was the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia; in 1325 he transferred the seat of the metropolitanate from Kiev to Moscow, ed.). At that point, the occasion was devoted to the 700th anniversary of the start of the saint’s ministry in Moscow and the founding of the Vysoko-Petrovskaya monastery.
Official knowledge is for 34 to 40,000 individuals within the Moscow “campaign”, however there isn’t a scarcity of hyperbole from Orthodox-patriotic sources about 100 and even 150,000 folks collaborating. The latter are thus arguing with the statistics, in keeping with which 250,000 Muslims gathered in Moscow for Kurban Bayram in June of that yr, with 80,000 praying within the central mosque. The patriarch additionally hinted that the occasion had such a function, noting in his sermon earlier than it started that the procession was meant “as an affidavit to the truth that Moscow is really the Orthodox capital of our fatherland… It is a metropolis that won’t surrender its Christian heritage. This is the historic fact and justice that we, the individuals within the procession, recall and affirm with it.”
But the primary message of the procession was heard within the type of a prayer name, accepted by the patriarch and loudly pronounced by the archdeacon: “We pray for the president of our nation, Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich, that from heaven he could also be given… to manipulate our nation nicely, to instill peace and order in it.”
As early as August 22, the order was posted in Moscow parishes: “The chairmen of Moscow church buildings should make sure the participation of a minimum of 30 laypeople from every parish, and from these with many clergy (the place multiple priest serves), metoses and stavropegic monasteries — a minimum of 50 laypeople.”
