Archbishop of Prague arrives in Оdessa to express prayerful support for UOC

Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Izmail meeting with His Eminence Archbishop Michael of Prague and the Czech Lands

The meeting took place at the Odessa Holy Dormition Monastery, reports "Orthodox Odessa".

The Archbishop of Prague arrived in Odessa to show prayerful support for the much-suffering canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, reports the site of the Odessa eparchy of the Ukrainian Church.

Greeting Met. Agafangel, Abp. Michael stressed that is “glad to be here, to share in the joy of worship and to sympathize with your situation. We have arrived to show our unity with you, as representatives of an autocephalous Church”.

Abp. Michael further stressed that Constantinople’s present course of action in Ukraine is impermissible and that all the Orthodox must, therefore, stand together: “We greatly sympathize with you and we tell the people that we are with you—the Czechs, and the Slovaks, and the Transcarpathian, and even the Orthodox Germans should be like one family. Your joy is our joy; your woes are our woes. We should support one another both in word and in prayer. In our eparchy, we read a prayer for peace in Ukraine and for the unity of the Church in every Liturgy. Let us pray, pray, and pray. Prayer is the most important thing. And we—the Orthodox—should be together.”

In his turn, Met. Agafangel told Abp. Michael about his visit to Constantinople as the head of a delegation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that met with Patriarch Bartholomew and held hours-long negotiations on the fate of Orthodoxy in Ukraine. The Ukrainian hierarch expressed his regret that Pat. Bartholomew refused to listen to the opinion of the canonical Church in Ukraine but is instead pushing ahead with his agenda to grant autocephaly to schismatics who are recognized by no Church other than Constantinople.

At the end of the meeting, Met. Agafangel presented Abp. Michael with an icon of the Kasperov Mother of God, the Heavenly protectress of the Black Sea region.

As the UOJ reported, at the end of September 2018, Patriarch of Alexandria Theodore II visited Odessa, urging Ukrainian believers to "strictly preserve the holy canons, loyalty to the Orthodox Church and its canonical Primate, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and All Ukraine".

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