Priest explains why he returned from OCU to UOC

Fr. Andriy Shymanovych. Photo: screenshot from the Viche YouTube channel

In an interview with Ilona Sokolovska from the Viche project, Archpriest Andriy Shymanovych spoke about why he left for the Kyiv Patriarchate in 2017 and why he has now returned to his native Church.

According to him, his family made a conscious decision to embrace Ukrainianization back in 2014, “when the aggression against Ukraine had already effectively begun.”

“As a result, I felt this was lacking in the Church. I think it’s no revelation to say that the UOC we see today is not the same UOC we saw back then. Deep internal changes occurred precisely after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Today we see a completely different – truly patriotic – rhetoric, which, importantly, does not obscure the Church’s spiritual identity,” the priest said.

Speaking about his reasons for returning, Fr. Andriy noted that in the OCU “there is a problem when patriotism becomes so dominant in people’s minds that the Church itself gets pushed to the background. This is a serious problem.”

He added that while there are many good priests in the OCU – whose names he does not mention so as not to cause them problems – there is a general issue in that structure: “ideology tends to push out true ecclesial life, Gospel faith, theology, and everything else.”

The priest emphasized that nationalism within the Church is a contradiction in terms – but in the OCU, it is very pronounced.

“When a priest sprinkles Easter baskets and, instead of saying ‘Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!’ says ‘Glory to the Nation! Death to the Enemies!’ – and when you point out that this is something deeply disturbing, people respond: ‘No, you’re a Putin agent, a traitor.’ Do you see the problem?” he stressed.

When Sokolovska suggested these were isolated rather than systemic cases, Fr. Andriy disagreed.

“You know, it’s like a mycelium in the forest – an entire network underground. What we see on the surface are just a few mushrooms here and there. One case here, another there, a third – Roman Hryshchuk – and another one… The manifestations are varied, but the root is the same,” he said.

He sees a deeper issue in the fact that a nationalist ideology specific to Halychyna (Western Ukraine) is now being imposed across the whole country.

“As someone from central Ukraine – from Cherkasy – I see the problems. We’ve already had the experience of trying to stretch the Donbas mentality across all of Ukraine – and we remember how that ended. Now we’re trying to stretch the Galician mentality across the country. I don’t want that either, excuse me. I don’t want the ‘Russian world’ from Donbas, and I don’t want radical nationalism. I don’t want to build Ivano-Frankivsk in Cherkasy.

We in central Ukraine have always been very tolerant, open to dialogue, inclusive. But when something foreign is forcibly imposed on us, and someone considers themselves the standard-bearer of true Ukrainianness – I want to raise my voice,” the priest underscored.

Earlier, the UOJ reported that in August 2024, Fr. Andriy Shymanovych, formerly of the OCU, decided to return to the UOC.

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