Expert voices five main conclusions following Great Cross Procession of UOC

Prayer of the UOC on Vladimir Hill on July 27, 2021. Photo: tg-channel of Bishop Victor (Kotsaba)

According to the results of the Great Cross Procession of the UOC, which took place in Kyiv on July 27, 2021, five main conclusions can be drawn, says journalist and media expert Yuri Molchanov. He told about this on the air of the international project "People" on the Pershy Nezalezhny channel.

First, the unprecedented scale of the Cross Procession - 2021 testifies that the number of pilgrims and, accordingly, the number of parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is obviously growing from year to year, despite the artificially generated backlash. According to the expert, this is facilitated by “an emphatically peaceful tone and the strictest apoliticality – no anger, no irritability, no hate against the backdrop of mudflows of abuse, grime, bile from the opponents of the UOC.”

Secondly, everyone saw a striking contrast with the OCU “prayer service” on Vladimir Hill on July 28, hence this is “a simple and ingenious answer to all, to put it mildly, controversial sociology on the religious preferences of Ukrainians. On the one hand, there are numbers written by someone somewhere, and on the other, here it is, a live video, from a countless number of sources and angles. As they say, here everyone is free to decide for themselves what to believe: their own eyes and ears or someone's fake data."

Thirdly, pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, raiding and seizure of its temples by force not only did not demotivate believers but served as a factor for even closer cohesion. Here, according to Yuri Molchanov, the moment of obviousness is also triggered: no matter how much the OCU denies the facts of violence by their sympathizers, hundreds of video plots say it all, and "your actual deeds speak about you much louder than your own propaganda."

Fourthly, the hierarchy of the UOC began to speak clearly about its position on the current situation in World Orthodoxy.

And the fifth thing that Yuri Molchanov drew attention to following the results of the Great Cross Procession – 2021 is "the hysteria of dubious OCU-affiliated resources and, what is most sad, the hysteria of individual representatives of the ‘ecumenical’ patriarchate.”

Earlier, Yuriy Molchanov said that Phanar cannot “reset to zero” the Church of millions of Ukrainians.

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