Priests of the Bulgarian Church Condemn Archimandrite Who Concelebrated with the OCU
The clergy of the Sofia Eparchy supported Patriarch Daniel, calling on the church court to punish the abbot for insulting the Church and concelebrating with the OCU.
The clergy of the Sofia Eparchy of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church issued a condemnation of the anticanonical actions and public slander by Archimandrite Nikanor (Mishkov), who concelebrated with Epifaniy Dumenko at the Volodymyr Cathedral in Kyiv. This was reported by Romfea.
On July 30, 2026, a gathering of the capital's clergy took place in Sofia under the chairmanship of His Holiness Patriarch Daniel. At this gathering, the priests presented a draft Declaration of Support for Patriarch Daniel, prompted by the systematic attacks in the media and social networks by the abbot of the Giginski Monastery, Archimandrite Nikanor.
The priests emphasized that their "prolonged patient silence could have been interpreted as indifference or tacit agreement with the accusations" that the abbot spreads daily in the public space.
The statements made by Archimandrite Nikanor on July 28, 2026, in which he called the Bulgarian Patriarchate a "semblance of a Church" and a "lackey of Russian imperialism," caused particular outrage among the clergy. In response, the priests declared: "We, as clergy of this very Church, do not consider ourselves anyone's lackeys and do not serve God in some 'semblance of a Church,' but are ministers in the Body of Christ."
The authors of the declaration noted that such rhetoric returns the Church to the times of the schism of the 1990s, when "bazaar-style and anti-church speech permitted all manner of verbal outrages directed at the Patriarch."
Archimandrite Nikanor was charged not only with insults but also with gross violations of church discipline, including concelebrations abroad with "anticanonical clergy" without the blessing of his ruling bishop. The text emphasizes that Nikanor went so far as to call for a "church-popular struggle" to create some kind of "true people's church," which was described as a "demonic desire."
"Turning public self-expression into a kind of 'media asceticism' in practice replaces monastic silence and obedience with political propaganda and systematic provocations," the clergy of the Sofia Eparchy emphasized.
The clergy called on church authorities to examine Nikanor's case with full severity, stressing that "church punishment is not an act of revenge, but a spiritual medicine and a boundary that the Church is obliged to establish." In conclusion, the clergy recalled the duty to defend the Primate: "When your father, whom you love, is unjustly slandered, to remain silent is humiliating. When the Church, in which we hope to be saved, is slandered, to withhold one's position is a sin."
Previously, the UOJ reported that the Bulgarian Church suspended from ministry the archimandrite who concelebrated with the OCU.
