OCU journalist calls activists’ antics at UOC court hearings a circus
Radical activists protesting during UOC court hearings. Collage: UOJ
Religious commentator and Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) member Tetiana Derkach has described radical activists’ protests outside the Northern Commercial Court of Appeal, where cases involving the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are being heard, as a circus and an expression of fanaticism.
In a Facebook post, the journalist wrote that she watches the pickets staged by the so-called activists with sadness. In her view, such behavior appeals only to people with unhealthy minds, while this kind of fanaticism “is as different from patriotism as a sewer is from a canal.”
Derkach compared the scenes outside the courthouse to a stunt staged by activists led by the occultist Veliar, who performed a mock “funeral service” for the UOC outside the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.
“It’s a shame there are no adults in the room to explain to these latter-day fanatics that their efforts to ‘de-occupy Ukrainian Orthodoxy’ have about as much to do with de-occupation and Orthodoxy as a guinea pig has to do with either Guinea or pigs,” Tetiana Derkach concluded.
As the UOJ previously reported, Derkach had earlier warned that the seizures of UOC churches risk stripping the Church of its sacred character.
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