OCU: One monk per monastery

"Service" of the OCU in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. Photo: UOJ

At its recent “bishop’s council,” the OCU “hierarchs” praised the authorities for their efforts to destroy the UOC and once again called on everyone to join their structure.

Epifaniy (Dumenko) also announced statistics for his organization. Let’s take a brief look at them.

He claimed that the OCU has 9,000 parishes and 6,000 clergy. Yet, according to official statistics, there are only 4,500 “priests” in the structure. That’s roughly 2 churches per priest. How realistic is that? Not very.

But that’s not even the whole picture. The DESS’s mobilization exemption list shows about 2,000 OCU clergy. A simple calculation (6,000 – 2,000) means 4,000 of Dumenko’s clergy have no exemption. Yet we’ve heard no outrage or protest from the OCU. Which suggests DESS is right: in reality, the OCU has around 2,000 active clergy for those 9,000 parishes – many of them deacons. So each priest would be covering about 5–7 churches. That’s just wildly unrealistic.

The situation with monasteries is even more interesting. Not long ago, Dumenko urged Ukrainians to “listen to that quiet call” and become monks. Clearly, that appeal wasn’t for nothing. He said the OCU now has over 90 monasteries. But he was conspicuously silent about the number of monks. And not without reason.

The last known figure, announced in 2021, was 233 monks. That number hadn’t changed since 2015 (back when it was the UOC-KP + UAOC combined). We haven’t heard of any surge in tonsures in the OCU, so it’s safe to assume they’re still hovering around 230.

DESS head Olena Bohdan said in 2022 that there were about 50 monks in Kyiv alone. That leaves Dumenko with roughly 180 outside the capital (230 – 50). Subtract 63 “hierarchs” (who certainly don’t live in monasteries) and you’re left with just 120 monks for all those “monasteries.”

Divide those 120 monks by 90 monasteries and you get a truly strange number: about 1.3 monks per monastery outside Kyiv. And when Dumenko officially opens another 30 monasteries on paper, they’ll end up with literally one monk per monastery.

And this isn’t propaganda or slander. It’s just the numbers.

DESS claims the OCU is now bigger than the UOC. But the UOC has around 5,000 monastics in 260 monasteries. The OCU? Around 230 for over 90.

Monasticism is a response to grace. When a person feels Christ touching their heart, they can’t live as before – they can’t live like everyone else. A Church is alive not because it has government backing or sky-high opinion poll numbers, but because it has people who’ve answered “yes” to Christ’s call.

As they say about parish life: “parishioners vote with their feet.” The same applies to monasticism. The OCU’s clergy and faithful clearly have no desire to become monks within this structure. Maybe they sense something?

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