On February 20, 2012, Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Department for External Church Relations, met at the DECR with the secretary of the governing board of the Union of Russian Writers, Yuri A. Belyaev. Present at the meeting were also members of the Academy Presidium.
Mr Belyaev, acting on behalf of the Academy’s leaders, greeted His Eminence Hilarion and informed him of the decision to elect him as full member of the Academy.
In his response, Metropolitan Hilarion thanked Mr Belyaev and the Academy’s leaders for the honour of being elected as full member of the Academy of Russian Language and Literature. He said, ‘Having become head of the DECR, I continue what His Holiness Patriarch Kirill did while at this post. This includes addresses to various audiences including non-Orthodox Christians and people of other religious confessions. In addition to this duty I have others. In particular, I was recently been appointed as chairman of the Synodal Biblical-Theological Commission and I am rector of the Church Postgraduate and Doctoral School. I therefore have to address many audiences, to write much, especially in Russian, and I believe it is one of my tasks to help propagate the Russian language both inside and outside our homeland.
The Russian language has been handed down to us by our ancestors and great writers, and our task is to preserve it, to participate in its development and perhaps to model this development to a certain extent. Sometimes a language develops according to laws it should not follow, and the fate of a language depends on changes taking place in public life. And more often than not, completely inadmissible jargons become part of a language. Our common task is to preserve and foster the Russian language, to instill in people the love of correct Russian, to see to it that people stop using profanities and all that not only corrupts and defiles the language but desecrates human life.
‘The Academy of Russian Language and Literature has great tasks before it, and I would like once again to thank you for your kind attention to my modest works. I would like to assure you that I will continue as far as I can to work on the preservation, development and fostering of our great and powerful Russian language’.
After that, Metropolitan Hilarion was presented with the diploma and certificate of a full member of the Academy.