Head of UAOC community which changed to UGCC thanks Epiphany for restraint

Heads of the OCU and UGCC Epiphany Dumenko and Sviatoslav Shevchuk. Photo: UGCC

The rector of St. Dimitrius church in Kharkov, “Archpriest” Vitaliy Zubak, whose community voted on June 14 this year to pass from the UAOC to the UGCC, thanked the head of the OCU Epiphany Dumenko and his supporters for their “restraint and caution” in this situation. This is stated in the appeal published on the website of the Kharkov-Poltava Diocese of the UAOC on June 17, 2020.

“I have the honor to thank Your Beatitude, clergy and faithful of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine for the restraint and caution shown during the provocative campaign organized in Kharkov by several marginalized individuals in order to pit the fraternal Ukrainian Christian Churches,” wrote the “clergyman.”

According to him, “scandalous whoopers, not affiliated to any Orthodox community, intended to imitate in our city the conflict between the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which the Holy Dimitrius parish joins, and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”

“It is not difficult to guess whose political order they fulfilled. But they failed to attract at least a single person from the parishioners of the Kharkov communities of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine to their shares. <...> We pray that, having successfully passed these trials, our communities in Kharkov, despite belonging to different jurisdictions, always show a model of fraternal solidarity and mutual understanding during the trials,” summed up “Archpriest” Vitaliy Zubak.

The pro-Filaret Facebook community “For the Ukrainian Church” called this appeal “an expression of gratitude for the undisguised treason of Orthodoxy.”

“Epiphany Dumenko-Chokaliuk, the head of the OCU-HCU (Holy Church of Ukraine – Ed.), is thanked for allowing the Orthodox community to become Greek Catholics! Having other evidence, we have long suspected Epiphany of being a secret sympathiser of the union but did not expect everything to go that far,” the community said.

Recall, on June 14, 2020, at a general meeting of the Holy Dimitrius parish of the UAOC in Kharkov, which was held under the protection of the “Right Sector”, parishioners almost unanimously voted for the transition to the UGCC. Earlier, a petition appeared on behalf of the community, whose authors opposed joining the UGCC and assured that most of the communities of the UAOC Diocese had changed to the OCU.

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