UOC bishops continue returning invitations to “Council” to Phanar
Invitation letters are sent back to the Phanar
The UOC archbishops continue returning letters from Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople inviting them to the “Unification Council” to the sender’s address – the Phanar. As it has become known, 56 bishops have already done so; excluding bishops who initially refused to accept invitation letters.
Earlier, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and All Ukraine, having received from Patriarch Bartholomew a letter inviting him to the “Unification Council,” sealed the message in an envelope and sent it back to the author without an answer. Other hierarchs of the UOC began to act in the same way, responding in this way to the Phanar’s ambiguous actions against the UOC and its bishops.
Metropolitan Luke of Zaporozhye and Melitopol returned the letter to Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople along with the answer, in which he stressed that Constantinople, by its actions, subjected the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to discrimination and persecution.
As the UOJ reported, Patriarch Bartholomew sent out invitations to the “Unification Council” to the UOC clergy. At the same time, a part of the messages was addressed not to the hierarchs themselves, but to the heads of local administrations, who called the bishops "on the carpet" to give the document and also personally urged the clerics to attend the "Council".
So, for example, the head of the Rovno Regional State Administration Alexey Muliarenko failed to deliver an invitation to Bishop Pimen of Dubno, who refused to accept it.
In the envelope with the invitation, each bishop also received a copy of the letter by Patriarch Bartholomew to His Beatitude Onufry, where it was reported that in case of a non-appearance of the “Unification Council,” the Phanar would regard Metropolitan Onufry a schismatic. The spokesperson for the UOC Protopriest Nikolai Danilevich has already called such Phanar’s action "a global church raiding of a pan-Orthodox scale".
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