Yesterday, His Beatitude and our delegation were driven to Butovo on the outskirts of Moscow to see the notorious killing fields used by Stalin during the worst years of religious and political repression. August 1937 to October 1938, at the height of the executions over 20,000 were shot and buried here.
Late in the afternoon, we went to Danilov Monastery to meet first with Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), head of the Department of External Church Relations, and then with His Holiness Patriarch Kirill for warm and substantive discussions on church life in North America and worldwide.
