“We have divorce statistics, they are horrible statistics, but no one is keeping statistics of splits of common-law marriages. If you try to calculate it all, what is our society? If you combine the statistics of common-law union splits and official divorce statistics, it turns our that we are all divorced. The entire society is a state of divorce,” the patriarch said while meeting with participants in the First International Congress of Orthodox Youth held in Moscow.
Patriarch Kirill has raised the issue of divorce before.
In August 2013, he said that “we would be a different country if we didn’t have so many abortions and so many divorces, which reach an average of 70% of all official marriages,” adding that the loss of family values has made people incapable of colonizing the huge territories of Russia.
In September 2011, the patriarch told ten marrying couples near the memorial in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of Nativity in Lugansk that “the divorce rate in our country is colossal,” adding that “people who marry for a second time are not insured against another divorce.”
In July 2009, the patriarch said in a sermon he gave at a liturgy in the Kiev Laura of the Caves that “families only fall apart because spouses no longer give themselves to each other, no longer care for each other, and no longer take their couples’ lives as their own.”
