The Odessa Diocese showed how they revived from ruins a church seized by the OCU

The Alexander Nevsky Church in Odesa today and in the 2000s. Photo: Facebook of the Odessa Diocese

In the Odessa Diocese, they recalled that after the church was returned to the Church in the 2000s, it was in a neglected condition and required colossal efforts to restore. In the diocese, they asked the question where those raiders who seized the church were when, on the site of the current well-maintained parish, there were ruins into which no one wanted to invest labor and money.

All the work of restoring, reviving, and adorning the shrine fell on the shoulders of the clergy and parishioners of the canonical Church. As spiritual instruction to their opponents, they recalled the words of Holy Scripture, "You shall not steal" (Exodus 20:15) and "Do not move the ancient boundary which your fathers have set" (Proverbs 22:28).

However, the diocese emphasized that the object of the raiders' claims systematically becomes precisely the property that was created by someone else's prayer and hard labor. “You will know them by their fruits,” the Odessa Diocese quoted the Gospel, noting that true love for the church is manifested in the readiness to serve God and people, and not in the desire to appropriate someone else's ready-made property.

Let us recall that on June 23, 2026, a group of OCU supporters carried out a forcible seizure of the Alexander Nevsky Church in Odesa. During the raider attack, unidentified persons beat the secretary of the Odessa Diocese of the UOC. OCU cleric Teodor Orobets announced his intention to rename the seized shrine and expressed outrage at the murals depicting saints, calling them “markers of Moscow life.”

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