"We think confining religion outside the public sphere is unacceptable. The time has come to recognise that the religious motivation is entitled to exist everywhere, including the public sphere". This was asked this morning by the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, Alexius II, as he spoke at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, on the invitation of its president, René Van der Linden. "It was within a Christian system recalled the Patriarch that the view of the high dignity of the human person took shape". "Any honest specialist in European history" can prove that "the concept of human rights, the highest European political idea, has developed through the Christian lesson on dignity, freedom and the moral character of the human being". "Yet nowadays we see a split between rights and morality, and this split endangers the European civilisation. We can see that in a new generations of rights that clash with morality or the fact some human rights are used to justify immoral behaviours". (continued)
