Put your mouth down: Phanar addresses UOC hierarchs

Patriarch Bartholomew. Photo: Pravoslavie.ru

“Put your hands and mouth down from the Successor of those who made you Christians!” – this is how the representative of Phanar, Metropolitan Apostolos (Dannilidis) of Derkoi, addressed the hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in response to some "anti-church and anti-Greek statements" in the media.

An angry comment under the headline "Enough is enough, Hierarchs of the Russian Presence in Ukraine!" published by the Orthodox Times on Friday, July 30.

The Phanar hierarch was outraged that the UOC is boasting of the 1033th anniversary of the adoption of Christianity but is not mentioning anywhere who baptized it.

“I read with disgust in the media the anti-church and anti-Greek statements of representatives of the Russian presence in Ukraine and with holy indignation, I answer: Put your hands and mouth down from the Successor of those who made you Christians! You owe everything you are to what you so disparagingly call: Istanbul! For us, it is the one City that has stood here for centuries now and only benefits all of you who celebrate the thousand, one thousand, and thirty-three years of your Christianity, without mentioning anywhere who was the one who baptized you and gave you what you boast you have.”

“We have given you light, you are returning it to us in darkness! We gave you grace; you give us ungratefulness! We brought you culture, you insult us!" wrote the representative of the Church of Constantinople.

He also stated that the UOC professes "modern Protestantism" and demanded not only to "sit seriously in positions of humiliation and apprenticeship", but also "learn to teach from those who converted you to Christianity and not to think that you are teaching."

“Finally stop your malice, hatred and arrogance. Good enlightenment!" summed up the hierarch of Phanar.

Earlier, the UOC published the appeal of monastics to Patriarch Bartholomew, adopted at the Congress in Pochayiv. The head of Phanar was called on to assess the consequences of his actions in relation to the canonical UOC and to reconsider the decisions that provoked the divisions so as not to go down in the history of Orthodoxy in the ranks of the traitors to the Church.

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