Zoria: We ask Ukrainian power to adopt bill #5309

Spokesman of the UOC KP Eustratiy Zoria

The UOC KP wants the Parliamentarians to adopt the bill # 5309, said the secretary of the Holy Synod of the Kiev Patriarchate Eustratiy Zoria during the press conference on the granting of autocephaly to Ukraine (his statement can be seen at 24:06).

“We request the Verkhovna Rada to adopt such a law so that the Church in Ukraine, which is called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, bears its true name being the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” said the UOC KP spokesman and stressed that citizens of the state “have the right to know the truth”.

Bill No. 5309 has to do with the name of religious organizations and associations, whose “governing center” is based “in a state that is recognized by law as carrying out military aggression against Ukraine and / or having temporarily occupied part of the territory of Ukraine”. Zoria recalled that the authors of the bill indicated on what grounds it is possible to determine the involvement of the leadership of the Church in the aggressor state.

One of the signs is the records about “such relations”, made in the statutes of the religious organization itself and its “headquarters”. The fact that Kiev is called the center of the UOC in the statute of the Russian Orthodox Church is interpreted by Zoria as a deception from Moscow.

The spokesman of the Kiev Patriarchate did not even mention the fact that the status of self-governance is enshrined in the statute of the UOC, and that it is governed by the Council of the UOC. On the contrary, he declared, “And we will now look at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is called so. Does its statute foresee that it is part of the ROC? Yes. It does. It is written here.”

According to Zoria, there are a lot of organizations in Ukraine that, under the name “Ukrainian”, are trying to hide their service to Russia. He called on the Ukrainian Church "to be Ukrainian in essence" or not to claim the name "Ukrainian” at all.

The Spokesman of the UOC, Protopriest Nikolai Danilevich called the attempt to change the name of the Church as raiding. He recalled that "according to the legislation of our country, one can neither duplicate the legal name or change it."

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