Supporters of OCU seize UOC temple in vlg, Dvorets, Khmelnytsky region

On March 15, 2022, in the village of Dvorets of the Izyaslav district of the Khmelnytsky region, there was a meeting of the villagers, where they decided to “transfer” the religious community of the Holy Cross Church of the UOC to the OCU.

As the rector of the temple, Archpriest Grigory Palianytsia, told the UOJ, none of the UOC community members in the village of Dvorets came to this meeting. “Yesterday the head of the village called and said that people want to hold a meeting to move to the OCU? At first I wanted to go to the meeting, but the artchpriest advised not to do this during martial law but just to submit a complaint to law enforcement agencies, and I am going to do it now. The fact is that after the meeting they called me and told me to give the keys because we are allegedly the “Russian Church” and should go to the OCU,” Fr Grigory told the UOJ.

Having received a refusal from the rector of the Holy Cross Church, supporters of the OCU put a new lock on the door of the temple, with all the property of the parishioners remaining inside.

“I won’t remove this lock without the police, and the people are afraid to go into the temple now. Our parishioners do not want to move to the OCU, and I am not going to,” Archpriest Grigory Palianytsia emphasized. In addition to a statement to law enforcement agencies, the rector is going to appeal to the regional administration to report to the officials the tricks of the schismatics.

“We are already familiar with such tricks on the part of the OCU,” Archpriest Ioann Savelyev, the rector of St. Michael's Church in Izyaslav, who is familiar with the situation in the Dvorets, told the UOJ. “The same happened in another village – the temple was sealed by the local authorities, and two days later the OCU people came there, tore off the seals and began to serve. They don’t listen to anybody. Now there is a war, but we found ourselves in such a situation where the internal enemy is more terrible for us than the external one.

According to him, schismatics from the OCU now do not risk seizing churches with communities of hundreds of parishioners, they go to small villages where there are only 10–15  people, and there is no one to resist pressure from the authorities.

As reported, supporters of the OCU seized the UOC church in the Vinnytsia Eparchy.

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