Metropolitan Pavel addresses Lavra brethren from Lukyanivka prison

Metropolitan Pavel. Photo: lavra.ua

On July 17, 2023, the abbot of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Pavel of Vyshhorod and Chornobyl, addressed the brethren of the monastery from his place of detention, the website of the monastery reports.

“Peace be with you, beloved fathers and brothers! I am writing to you from the Lukyanivka pre-trial detention center in Kyiv, where the brethren of our Holy Lavra were imprisoned in the 1920s and 30s,” Vladyka wrote.

He noted that he was demanded that the monks exit from the Lavra, “in order to subject you and your relatives to blackmail and checks by the Security Service of Ukraine in the future, which I did not do.”

“All the accusations are utter lies. Wicked witnesses, including from the brethren, cannot accuse me of anything,” the bishop said and continued that no one listens to his lawyers, and all prisoners in the building he is placed in are “political”.

“The decisions of the judge were prepared a long time ago. The prosecutor, the investigator, the judge are the same troikas who once judged Mikhail Semyonovich Litvinenko and other confessors and martyrs of the faith,” the bishop said.

According to the UOC hierarch, in the pre-trial detention center in the corridor, he heard that he was under special supervision: “three locks and, apparently, the keys are held by different people, controlled by the first person in the country.”

Asking for the prayers of the brethren, Vladyka wrote that “you don’t need outside governors, all of the brethren in the Lavra are worthy, just do everything with blessing, patiently and with deep faith, then the Lord, the Mother of God and the Venerable Fathers will not leave you and me.”

“They wanted to forbid me not only to go to the Holy Lavra, but also to any church of our long-suffering Ukraine. I am a man of the Holy Church, a believer, I will endure everything with God's help,” Metropolitan Pavel says further.

Invoking God's blessing on everyone, he wrote to the brethren that his "consolation after Jesus Christ, the Mother of God and the Venerable Fathers of the Kyiv Caves is you."

“God bless you all. Your wretched prisoner and man of prayer, +M. Paul. I love and appreciate you all very much, I thank God for everything,” summed up the abbot of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that the judge did not issue a decision on the arrest of the Lavra abbot to the lawyer.

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