Chancellor: Patriarch Bartholomew is a major liability in persecution of UOC

The UOC delegation at Phanar in June 2018. Photo: UOC press service

The Chancellor of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Anthony of Boryspil and Brovary, issued an address in which he placed the lion’s share of responsibility for the persecution of the UOC on Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

He stated that about ten years ago “the Ukrainian Orthodox Church began to be openly fashioned into an enemy of Ukraine. Fake stories were created alleging that weapons were being stored in our churches and monasteries, that priests were refusing to bury fallen soldiers.”

Metropolitan Anthony devoted particular attention to the role of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the events of 2018, when an attempt was made to create the so-called unified autocephalous church in Ukraine. “Unfortunately, the lion’s share of responsibility for this lawlessness lies personally with the Primate of the Constantinople Patriarchate,” the UOC Chancellor said.

“We cannot expect ecclesial consciousness from politicians, even if they call themselves Christians and even Orthodox. For them, the Church is purely a social organization, one of the civic institutions,” Metropolitan Anthony explained.

“At the same time, priests, bishops, and all the more the Primates of one of the most ancient Local Churches, who bear exceptional responsibility for the present and future of world Orthodoxy, must care exclusively for the Church. External pressure or the wishes of politicians must not be a priority in church decisions,” the hierarch emphasized.

The Chancellor recalled a promise made by Patriarch Bartholomew: “When, in 2018, a delegation of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was at the Phanar, Patriarch Bartholomew said to us: ‘I will never cause pain to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.’” “I do not know whether, after such a promise, His All-Holiness today can look Metropolitan Arseniy of Sviatohirsk straight in the eyes, after he spent more than a year in pre-trial detention,” Metropolitan Anthony asked rhetorically.

He cited a long list of hierarchs who have been subjected to repression: “Metropolitans Pavel of Vyshhorod, Theodosiy of Cherkasy, Luke of Zaporizhzhia, Vissarion of Ovruch, Yevlogiy of Sumy, Ioasaph of Vasylkiv, Longin of Bancheny, Metropolitan Ionafan, Archbishop Job, and Protodeacon Vadym Novynskyi, who have been or remain under investigation. Many hierarchs, headed by His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry, who was deprived of citizenship, and an even greater number of bishops and clergy of our Church placed on sanctions lists.”

“I am not even speaking of the dozens of priests beaten and the hundreds of parishioners assaulted, of churches taken away and now closed and standing empty. Those who took them had no intention, a priori, of going to church to pray. For them it was merely a political action or a source of income,” the Chancellor noted. He also spoke separately about the shrines of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra: “What can one say about the holy relics of the ascetics of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, to which millions of people – not only our compatriots, but Orthodox believers from all over the world – once flocked in prayer, and which are now as if placed under arrest and subjected to certain experiments and studies?”

“Looking at this sacrilege, the heart bleeds. And the human mind is at a loss as to why and from where such hatred, malice, and intolerance arise in those who incessantly proclaim, in words, their commitment to democracy, freedom, and rights,” Metropolitan Anthony said.

Earlier, the UOJ reported that, according to Metropolitan Anthony, today’s church seizures are a carbon copy of the raider schemes of the 1990s.

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