"Witness to Life"

An interview with one of the members of the Moscow Patriarchate's Synodal Commission for the Glorification of Saints, Igumen Damascene (Orlovsky), can be found here. The interview was conducted in Russian, but has been translated into English. Most interesting to me was Fr. Damascene's comment that now that the Church of Rus' has glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Soviet Yoke it will never again need to borrow relics from other Local Orthodox Churches for the making of antimens (without which the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgies cannot be served). It would seem that that would not have been an issue before given how many cathedrals, churches, and monasteries I visited in Russia and Ukraine had not just one, but oftentimes multiple reliquaries containing whole bodies of Saints, but I guess such impressions can be misleading :-).