(Moscow) A new patriarch took charge of the Russian Orthodox Church on Sunday to become the first leader of the world’s largest Orthodox church to be installed after the Soviet Union’s fall.

The original 19th-century church was dynamited under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1931, but rebuilt in the late 1990s following the collapse of the officially atheist Soviet Union.

The cathedral was filled with ancient chants, incense smoke and worshippers holding candles for the 3 1/2-hour ceremony in which Kirill, 62, went through several changes of elaborate vestments, ending with a green and red patriarchal mantle and white headdress topped by a cross.

Top clerics as well as President Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and scores of other officials from Russia and abroad attended the ceremony.

“This is an event which opens a new level of development of Orthodoxy in our country and creates, we hope, new conditions for a full-fledged dialogue of solidarity between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state,” Medvedev said at the end of the ceremony, which state TV broadcast live.

Kirill was elected Tuesday by a church council of top clerics, monks and lay electors, including government officials and businessmen.

Kirill, the former head of the church’s foreign relations department, succeeded Patriarch Alexy II, who died in early December after almost two decades at the helm.

Alexy, the church’s first post-Soviet leader, led his institution during an era when millions of Russians returned to their historic faith. The church now claims 100 million believers in Russia, the former Soviet republics and across the globe.

But polls show only about 5 percent of Russians are observant believers, and only 30 percent of the population believe they should follow the moral teachings of the church.

Kirill, who had long been Alexy’s deputy, has been critical of tolerance of homosexuality, abortion, multiparty democracy and the division of secular and religious authority.

Kirill adheres to nationalist ideas about Russia’s role in the world and supports the idea that Russian civilization is fundamentally different and opposed to Western concepts.

He has repeatedly advocated expanding the church’s outreach to younger and wider audiences, and has long pushed for introduction of Orthodox religious classes in schools.

Kirill is an unusually public and outspoken religious figure in the church known for its traditionalism and resistance to change. He appears on TV shows and frequently voices his opinion on secular matters, including Russia’s current economic crisis.

Kirill will face opposition from a strong conservative movement within the church that sees him as too modern and eager for a rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church. Among the changes Kirill is likely to initiate is wider use of Russian language in services instead of the archaic Church Slavonic and permission for women to wear pants inside churches.

“He will have an uneasy choice – to initiate reforms and turn the church into a lively body that responds to the needs of modern man, or reject even superficial novelties and stick to the undying past,” religious expert Boris Falikov said.

On the day after his election, Kirill pledged to refrain from initiating “topdown reforms that hurt people,” but cautiously promised changes, the Interfax news agency reported.

“God forbid any patriarch from going down in history as a reformist,” Interfax quoted Kirill as saying. “But there are changes growing from within people’s lives.”

As a skilled politician and veteran diplomat, Kirill is expected by some to seek a more muscular role for the church, which has served the state for much of its 1,000-year history.

Church and state are officially separate under the post-Soviet constitution, but ties have tightened again since Putin came to power in 2000. Before he became patriarch, Kirill was in charge of contacts with the Vatican and met with Pope Benedict XVI in December 2007.

But after his election, church leaders ruled out a meeting between pope and patriarch – the unrealized dream of the late Pope John Paul II.

The Russian church accuses the Vatican of trying to convert Russians to the Catholic faith. There have also been disputes over property and influence in Ukraine, where both churches have large flocks.

Alexy’s death was followed by an intense election campaign within the church. In becoming his church’s supreme cleric, Kirill defeated a powerful Moscow bishop and the leader of the church in neighboring Belarus.

Some supporters of competing candidates sought during the campaign to renew attention to allegations that Kirill profited from questionable financial deals in the 1990s when the church was allowed for several years to import tobacco and alcohol duty-free.

The new church leader was born as Kirill Gundyaev into a priest’s family in 1946 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. He advanced in the church hierarchy at a time when it was closely monitored by the KGB and Politburo, and clerics who objected to government control were routinely harassed and imprisoned.

Kirill served under two patriarchs elected from Politburo-provided one-man lists, and became an archbishop in the late 1970s.

He was appointed the head of the church’s foreign relations department after the 1988 millennial celebration of Russia’s conversion to Christianity, an event seen as a turning point in relations between the Kremlin and the church. Kirill became an influential figure under Alexy, who was elected in 1990.