On visiting Zaporozhye Cathedral believers restrain from moving to OCU

Кафедральный собор ПЦУ в Запорожье. Фото из социальных сетей

The "bishop" and "priests" of the Zaporozhye Eparchy of the OCU do not want to fulfill the Law of God, the monks go in civilian clothes, and weddings and baptisms are held in haste. This is what M. Karnienko, a resident of the city of Volniansk, Zaporozhye region, who called himself a parishioner of the UOC but “for obvious reasons” did not name his parish, wrote about to the editorial board of the local edition "Subbota Plus" ( “Saturday Plus”).

In a letter, Karnienko said that since childhood he has been attending church services, but he is "a patriot of Ukraine and has always dreamed of services to be held in an understandable language” and of "praying for Ukrainian authorities and peace on our land."

“We gathered a delegation and went to Zaporozhye, to the central Cathedral of the Holy Trinity of the OCU. After the ignorance that we saw there, we lost the desire to move to the Kiev Patriarchate!!!” wrote Karnienko.

At first, the delegation was struck by the fact that young men in civilian clothes were “priests” of the cathedral.

“I have not seen such madness in the Moscow Patriarchate in my life,” Karnienko explained. “All priests are shaved, have a haircut, and some are like skinheads. All are dressed in civilian short-sleeved shirts. No one, approaching the Cathedral, crossed themselves but greeted with a handshake. Then another man, just as strange, came and opened the Cathedral. All went to put on the cassock. “We were extremely surprised, so we did not tell them that we had come to resolve the issue of joining our parish to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”

When they saw the "bishop" Photius, who also arrived in civilian clothes, they were "completely dumbfounded" and "our desire both to talk and join disappeared!!!"

The delegation from Volniansk also learned that “Divine services at the Main Cathedral of the Zaporozhya Eparchy are held not every day, rarely!!! The priests and the bishop are ashamed of their priesthood and hide from people!!! Weddings and baptisms are held in haste, the main thing is payment, price ... During the service, nothing is heard, therefore there are very few people. We were warned that none of the priests of the Zaporozhye Eparchy fulfills priesthood rules. Women who work in the cathedral come to worship in trousers.”

“We have a desire to join the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in other parishes, but we need a church order <...> If the Bishop and priests do not want to fulfill the Law of God, we will appeal to Metropolitan Epiphany, the Ecumenical Patriarchate,” resumed Karnienko, expressing the hope that "perhaps in the Eparchy there are at least two or three normal priests who love and fear God's punishment".

At the request of the journalists to comment on this letter, the OCU “clergyman”, Igor Savva, replied that he had never observed canonical violations at the Zaporozhye Cathedral: “But in general, the canons of the Orthodox Church are a complex and controversial topic. The canons, unlike dogmas, are not provisions of the faith, they are legal rules developed in the church in ancient times. Without special study, few can understand what these or those rules meant in their time.”

For the same comment, journalists turned to the clergyman of the Church of Saints Peter and Fevronia, Archpriest Alexander Ovcharenko, who noted that “ordinary people may not be very knowledgeable in theology, but they feel the Truth with their hearts. People will not go to a bitter spring. People themselves saw the violation of the canons (and how could it be different in the structure, the creation of which occurred with the wildest violation of the basic canons of ecclesiastic law!) It’s a pity that they didn’t leave but were still tempted by the ‘sweet speeches’ of wolves in sheep’s clothing”.

As reported by the UOJ, earlier "bishop" Photius said that in the OCU they would hold the funeral service for the deceased, regardless of confession, "even for the Catholic".

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