On how the OCU scorns its own rent-a-crowd

The OCU’s “service” at the Lavra on the Feast of the Transfiguration in 2023. Photo: UOJ

On March 8, coaches once again rolled into the Kyiv Caves Lavra, bringing in people from the provinces for the “liturgy” with Dumenko. The OCU and its media cheerleaders promptly pushed out images from the Refectory Church brimming with “worshippers.” Yet just one day earlier, judging by the OCU press service’s own photographs, that very same church could muster no more than four or five people. And there is every reason to believe that once Dumenko and his imported congregation vanish, the familiar emptiness will return right on cue.

This is not some unfortunate one-off. It is the system. The same thing happened in Volodymyr, where officials rounded people up from across the region for Dumenko’s appearance at the Dormition Cathedral. The same charade played out in Cherkasy, Bila Tserkva, Khmelnytskyi, and elsewhere, in cities where the OCU took over churches and cathedrals from the UOC. The formula never changes: Dumenko arrives – the buses arrive. Dumenko leaves – the people evaporate.

Which raises an obvious question: what is all this theater for?

Back in 2023, when the OCU began staging regular “services” at the Lavra, UOJ published footage from the all-night vigil for the Feast of the Transfiguration. The result was embarrassing. In the enormous Refectory Church stood exactly four people – and, judging by their clothes, they looked like tourists who had wandered in by accident.

That was when OCU spokesman Zoria went into damage-control overdrive. He insisted that his organization was not interested in “mass turnout” and that such a fixation was supposedly a trademark of the “Russian world.” As proof, he claimed that Patriarch Alexy II of the Russian Orthodox Church, while visiting dioceses, had allegedly demanded one thing above all else: bigger crowds. “Mass turnout, mass turnout!” he supposedly kept saying. The OCU, by contrast, was of a higher order entirely. For them, Zoria declared, “what matters is truth, not quantity.”

“If there is truth, sooner or later it will gather people.”

Nearly three years have passed. The results are now in.

Apparently, truth in the OCU works only when it is shipped in on chartered buses.

So judge for yourself. Where Dumenko goes, the crowd is delivered. Where Dumenko is absent, so is everybody else.

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