When Christ and Mother of God fall among the ‘Muscals’

Broken icons from the UOC church in Novosilky after the OCU takeover. Photo: Screenshot from Dozor video

In Novosilky, Kyiv region, activists of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, who seized the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, organized a ‘clean-up’ in the temple. Many mangled icons of Christ, the Virgin Mary and St Nicholas ended up in the trash. The UOC believers with tears in their eyes pulled out the Gospel, the Law of God, St Luke's book ‘I Loved Suffering’ and a lot of other spiritual literature from the heap of garbage.

Just yesterday such a thing seemed unthinkable – well, a Christian cannot burn and throw holy things in the rubbish. But today it is a reality. And the OCU has been moving towards this tragic reality systematically and consistently.

In 2019 in Kurozvany, Rivne region, the activists of the OCU broke the doors of the house church of the UOC (they had seized the temple itself earlier) and threw the altar right on the road. No one “from above” reprimanded them. What's the big deal? After all, this is a “Muscal church”.

In April 2023, after the seizure of the church in Trebukhiv, OCU activists declared the Bible “rubbish” (only because it was printed in Moscow) and threw it into a rubbish dump together with prayer books (published, by the way, in Kyiv). And again, no one in the leadership of the OCU reacted to this. Could they have reacted? After all, Dumenko clearly outlined the strategy of his structure just the day before – everything “non-Ukrainian” will be strictly discarded. In January 2023, he called on Ukrainians to abandon their "Russian" saints and choose saints of other nationalities. And already in 2024, the OCU Synod removed Saint Alexander Nevsky, the Kyiv Prince, from the calendar of saints.

So, the trend is clear – any, even the faintest "shadow of Moscow", must be "excluded" from the saints, and one must renounce their heavenly patron. Ordinary people have simply taken a step further – if the Gospel was printed in Moscow, throw it in the trash. If the icon hung in the "wrong" church – break it and trample it underfoot.

And the problem is not that we want to tarnish the OCU in some way. It is much deeper. In fact, the strategy of this structure has led to a situation where, under the guise of fighting the ‘Muscals’, they are fighting against the Church and God. And this is no exaggeration – the destruction of icons and the Holy Scriptures speaks for itself.

By the way, in Novosilky, along with icons and Bibles, a "nationalist’s Bible" – "History of Ukraine-Rus" by Hrushevsky – was found in the trash. A cognitive dissonance, indeed.

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