On the first day of Great Lent, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church called on believers to overcome pride and fight envy with good deeds and prayer.

"The life approach of a proud person entails many dangerous consequences, one of which is the vice of envy," Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia said Monday after an evening service in downtown Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral attended by over 3,000 people.

"If other vices are accompanied by a seeming pleasuring, then envy always means anguish," he said, adding that an envious person becomes aggressive and that the first murder on Earth was committed by Cain out of envy.

The Book of Genesis says that Adam's son Cain killed his brother Abel after God did not show respect for Cain's offering but accepted Abel's. "And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell... and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him." (Genesis, 4:5,8)

Patriarch Kirill advised envious people to do good deeds. "Try to do a good deed to a person you envy, and envy will gradually abandon you," he said.

Russia's church leaders have repeatedly lamented that many contemporary people are more focused on transitory pleasures of life rather than on spiritual values. Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church's external relations department, said earlier in February that the scale of priorities today for many people "looks totally different than what is in line with Christian tradition."

Hilarion voiced concern then that "freedom, permissiveness, acquisitiveness, lust for success and career aspirations are in first place rather than traditional spiritual and moral values, family, marital fidelity or giving birth to children and raising them."

During Great Lent, believers in particular abstain from meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. But the true purpose of fasting is not abstention from these products in itself. Fasting helps people cleanse their souls of sin and learn to fight bad habits and dark thoughts, as well as to control their desires. In this way, believers prepare through prayer and fasting for Easter, Christianity's most important feast commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

MOSCOW, February 15 (RIA Novosti)