DESS expert to UOC: Serve now in basements, for you wanted persecution

Yurii Chornomorets. Photo: Facebook/Chornomorets

Yurii Chornomorets, a DESS expert and theologian of the OCU, commented on the decision of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) recognizing the UOC as affiliated with Moscow.

According to him, the churches used by UOC believers can be divided into three categories:

About 3,000 historical buildings and cultural monuments, which the state must now seize by terminating all lease and usage agreements.

Churches built by the religious communities themselves – “under question,” since they allegedly “fall outside Ukraine’s legal framework” as religious organizations.

Churches in private ownership – these will remain the last, but even there investigations are possible, as the transfer of religious property into private hands is punishable by years of imprisonment.

“Please, serve somewhere in apartments, in basements. You wanted to be persecuted – religious buildings are not for you,” Chornomorets said rather cynically.

The expert claimed that the UOC itself created the situation in which the authorities are mobilizing its clergy: “You yourselves made it so that your religious organization has no right for its representatives to be exempt from mobilization.”

What exactly the UOC supposedly “made it so” to cause priests to be driven to the front, the DESS expert did not specify.

“It is very funny, because, first of all, no one is actually persecuting you anymore. Secondly, you yourselves are to blame for everything,” Chornomorets emphasized.

According to him, the UOC behaves like an “anti-Ukrainian sect” and complains to the whole world: “We are persecuted, we are so oppressed, all of Ukraine is a terrible force – let the whole world defend us.”

Earlier, the UOJ reported that the DESS had declared the Kyiv Metropolia of the UOC to be affiliated with Moscow.

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