30,000 Orthodox Churches Now Operating in Russia

Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church cited the statistics that 23,000 Orthodox churches have been restored in Russia over the past two decades, Interfax reports

"We got used to it somehow, it has become commonplace: reconstructed, adjusted, restored. But let us just think about one figure: 23,000 churches have been restored in these 20 years," he said at a meeting of the Patriarchal Council for Culture at the Christ the Savior Cathedral.

"No other country has ever seen anything like that," he said.

Patriarch Kirill emphasized that this had been done against the backdrop of economic, political and social confrontation, rather than at a time of economic and political security and social well-being.

"The world should be aware of Orthodox Russia's potential – we are capable of performing a great feat of recreating destroyed and desecrated things out of oblivion," he said.

By 1991 the former USSR had 7,000 active churches, whereas the current number of churches has reached 30,000, Patriarch Kirill said.

It has to be noted that in Ukraine there are over 11,000 churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.