Filaret: Pat. Bartholomew asked President to speed up liquidation of UOC-KP

Vladimir Zelensky and Patriarch Bartholomew. Photo: Facebook

During a meeting with Vladimir Zelensky in Istanbul this summer, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople asked the newly elected President of Ukraine to speed up the liquidation of the Kiev Patriarchate, said "Patriarch" Filaret Denisenko in an interview published on the official website of the UOC-KP.

“We want Ukraine to have an independent Church,” Filaret explained. “And we do have – this is the renewed Kiev Patriarchate. Now there is a struggle, a struggle for the destruction of the Kiev Patriarchate. Who is fighting against us? It’s not so much the Moscow Patriarchate that fights as the so-called OCU.”

According to him, the OCU is so “aggressively fighting” against the UOC-KP because it “fulfills the task of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew – to completely destroy the Kiev Patriarchate so that no spirit of it remains”.

“When the new President Zelensky Vladimir Alexandrovich was with the Ecumenical Patriarch on July 7 (August 8 – Ed.) this year, the patriarch asked him to speed up the liquidation of the Kiev Patriarchate. That is, the Ecumenical Patriarch is concerned about the destruction of the Kiev Patriarchate. <...> Thank God that the President answered with dignity: he will not interfere in church affairs but treats all Churches equally, keeping the constitutional right of citizens to freedom of conscience and religion,” Filaret said.

However, the head of the UOC-KP emphasized that despite such an answer by Zelensky, "the struggle for the destruction of the Kiev Patriarchate continues and it has come to the point that Metropolitan Epiphany created the liquidation commission of the Kiev Patriarchate" without legal grounds.

“In this lawlessness, officials of former President Poroshenko helped him. Because Poroshenko, when he saw that he would not become President again, placed his loyal officials in the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Justice, and they, without our consent, i.e. without my consent as a leader, removed the Kiev Patriarchate from registration, without having the right to do so. You see: when they strive to achieve their goal, they are not guided by the laws!” Denisenko noted.

At the same time, according to Filaret, the struggle is going on personally against him, although "if I hadn’t been there, Moscow would have dominated here for a long time, and Putin would have dominated in Ukraine".

We recall Filaret believes that the Patriarch of Bartholomew of Constantinople seeks absolute power in Orthodoxy.

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