Met. Jonathan: Trial against me – an episode of overall persecution of UOC

Metropolitan Jonathan. Photo: The Tulchyn Eparchy’s website

Metropolitan Jonathan of Tulchyn said in an interview with the UOJ that his sentence is just an episode in the government's overall strategy to destroy the UOC.

According to him, the media campaign in the mass media against the Church is an order from the authorities and is part of the overall plan to persecute the UOC.

"Their goal is obvious – to politically compromise the UOC and its hierarchy in one swoop, to justify the ban and activities of the UOC, to intimidate priests and parishioners with persecution. The catalyst for the persecution of the canonical Church, the seizure of its monasteries and churches by extremists was the granting of the so-called "autocephalous" tomos to the OCU, which was not even recognised by the unrecognised "patriarch" Filaret Denisenko," the bishop said.

Metropolitan Jonathan is sure that the sentence handed down to him is "one of the episodes of reprisals against the defenders of their faith and the Church".

He recalled that the "evidence" of his guilt was falsified by one of the SBU officers who planted leaflets compromising the bishop during the search and that this moment was recorded by the camera of another SBU officer.

"The video recording of the SBU, denouncing the malpractice of Vinnytsia investigators, is real video evidence. It has been viewed with appropriate comments by hundreds of thousands of viewers of "KozakTV1", numerous priests and parishioners. This record has been seen by representatives of the UN, the American lawyer of the UOC Robert Amsterdam, other foreign lawyers," the bishop stressed.

Earlier, Metropolitan Jonathan (Yeletskykh) of Tulchyn and Bratslav joined the international human rights group.

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