Filaret offers Ukrainian Orthodox Church to unite into a "single Church"

Filaret proposed to His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry to create a "single local Church." Photo: dialog.ua

Filaret Denisenko, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate, wrote an open letter to the Primate of the UOC, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry. The leader of the schismatic organization offered to "unite" and create a "single local Church." The appeal was published on the official website of the UOC-KP.

According to Denisenko, "a single local Church" "will unite all Ukrainians, bring peace to Ukraine, preserve its integrity and independence."

The UOJ made an extensive coverage of the previous "unification" initiative of the Ukrainian schismatics, which almost immediately collapsed and brought an even greater schism into Ukraine, and then into the entire World Orthodoxy. On December 15, 2018, the so-called “Unification Council” was held in Kyiv, during which two schismatic groups – the UOC-KP and the UAOC –  merged into the Orthodox Church of Ukraine with the active participation of the then President Petro Poroshenko and the support of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Sergei Dumenko (Epifaniy) was elected the head of the OCU. He was earlier “ordained” by Denisenko, who had been already defrocked and anathematized. Filaret called himself the “honorary patriarch” of the OCU for a while, but soon the new organization split, and he returned to the leadership of the UOC-KP, which had lost some of the clergy. Legal disputes and lawsuits over property between the two schismatic groups continue to this day.

As reported by the UOJ, the Synod of the UOC urged to stop bloodshed between brotherly peoples.

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