Kirill I

Kirill I (born November 20, 1946, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], Russia) is the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia from 2009.

Gundyaev took the monastic name Kirill in 1969 while a seminarian. He graduated in 1970 from Leningrad Theological Academy, where he served as lecturer in dogmatic theology for one year. In 1971 Kirill was appointed representative of the Russian Orthodox Church at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Returning to Russia in 1974, he became rector of Leningrad Theological Academy, a post he held until 1984. He became archbishop of Smolensk and Kaliningrad in 1988 and was elevated to metropolitan of that province in 1991. He was elected to the patriarchate in January 2009.

Kirill was the first head of the Russian Orthodox Church to be elected after the fall of the Soviet Union. He inherited from his predecessor, Aleksey II (reigned 1990–2008), a church that had experienced revitalization and tremendous growth following the end of official state atheism in Russia. Kirill shared with Aleksey an outspoken belief that the church should play a dynamic role in Russian life. A popular figure who for more than a decade hosted his own weekly television show on religious topics, he also enjoyed a reputation for being a modernizer. Upon assuming the partriarchate, he expressed his long-standing desire for increased dialogue to end the church’s millennium-old rift with the Roman Catholic Church. In February 2016 he and Pope Francis I held the first-ever meeting between the leaders of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.