“There are many things we can do together without being fully united yet”. It is a road dotted with joint initiatives and plans, the one that the metropolitan bishop Hilarion, in charge of the Department for External Relations of the Patriarchate of Moscow, describes in an interview he gave in Paris to SIR and to “Famille Chrétienne”. “We are going through the same changes, and we can cooperate more intensively. Too often we do things separately. For example, the Pope makes a statement and the Patriarch says the same thing, but they do it separately. I am sure the message they send can be stronger if they both spoke with one voice. This is what happened in Havana. They did not say anything revolutionary or new, nothing they had not said before. But what mattered is that they were together, that they said something in one voice, that they could speak together and take joint measures. I think that in this way we will have more and more impact”. As an example of real cooperation, the Russian metropolitan bishop mentions the current project in support of the Syrian populations. “We chose Syria because in that country people are suffering. It is a country where there’s a war, there are victims, there are refugees and they need help. We organised joint humanitarian missions. The leaders of our Churches visited several communities, cities and villages to see how things stand and what they really need. Of course, what we can do is not enough to solve the problems of that country. Political solutions can. But we work all the same. Pope Francis had contacts with the leaders of many countries about Syria. And Patriarch Kirill is doing as much”.