MOSCOW - A new patriarch was seated on the throne of the Russian Orthodox Church Sunday, becoming the first leader of the world's largest Orthodox church to take office after the fall of the Soviet Union. Patriarch Kirill, a veteran church diplomat and cautious advocate of change, became the 16th to bear the title in a solemn ceremony at Christ the Savior Cathedral, Moscow's most opulent church and itself a symbol of the rebirth of the Orthodox faith. The original 19th-Century was dynamited under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1931, but rebuilt in the late 1990s following the collapse of the...
photo: AP
