This is a day when words become difficult to utter. Because what we feel goes beyond ordinary pain, and what we experience goes beyond ordinary mourning, said Speaker of the Parliament at the funeral ceremony of the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia, Ilia II, at the Holy Trinity Patriarchal Cathedral.

"These days, we stand in silence filled with prayer. Our Holy Patriarch, His Holiness and Beatitude Ilia II, has stood before the Lord with his labor and his legacy.

His legacy is us – his nation, his flock, his spiritual children. The Lord sent him as one man, and he returns to the Creator with an entire nation – so visibly, so united, so whole, as we have clearly witnessed in these days.

We are the Patriarch`s generation, and we are witnesses to a unique phenomenon, when an entire nation is spiritually connected to one individual, when all active clergy in Georgia have been ordained with his blessing, and the absolute majority of Georgian Christians have been baptized with his blessing.

The present scale, form, and character of our two-thousand-year-old Church have been shaped by him.

His Holiness and Beatitude became that firm foundation of our nation and Church, which, in times of godlessness and nihilism, connected our past with the present, and the present with the future. Indeed, we witnessed a miracle of God – the Georgian Church, risen from ashes, which he alone, with bare hands, rebuilt from the beginning. He was able to do this because he knew what mattered most", - said Shalva Papuashvili.

As he added, in today`s world, many values compete for primacy – freedom, equality, solidarity, justice: "His Holiness and Beatitude gave each of them its proper place, but taught us the most important thing: that freedom, equality, and all other values lose their meaning if they are not founded on the supreme value – love. We had a Patriarch of love. A tireless preacher of it. Through his life, he became an example of how one can love everyone – one`s own and strangers, friends and enemies, the righteous and the sinners".

At the Holy Trinity Patriarchal Cathedral, where the Patriarch was lying in state, the divine service was conducted by the Locum Tenens of the Patriarchal Throne, Metropolitan Shio (Mujiri) of Senaki and Chkhorotsku, together with members of the Holy Synod of the Georgian Church.

After the service, the Archbishop of Constantinople–New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, together with the Locum Tenens Metropolitan Shio and members of the Holy Synod of the Georgian Church, performed the funeral rite for His Holiness and Beatitude Ilia II.