New causal disorders are being observed in the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Its representatives recently claimed that parishioners who switched to the OCU don’t need a church, because over 2.5 years of litigation, their OCU priest didn’t serve liturgies there and they never showed up.
“For two and a half years, not a single liturgy has been served on the part of the OCU. That is, they do not need the church – they need to ensure that no one delivers services in the village, so that no one served at all,” ROCinU priest Andriy Kozyuk said in an interview published on the YouTube channel of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations.
It is worth noting that in the village of Krasnosilky, in 2019, the local community re-registered their affiliation to quit the ROCinU and join the OCU. The ROCinU, however, filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the community’s vote. In order not to provoke conflicts and not to give the ROCinU propagandists a reason to claim a “seizure”, the OCU believers decided to wait until all court decisions are handed down to be able to then pray in peace in their church, with their priest Father Rostyslav.
On December 8, 2020, the PCU community won a lawsuit on the legality of voting and meetings of the religious community. On March 31, 2021, the parishioners of the PCU won the appeal. On July 5, 2021, the Supreme Court rejected the ROC’s second application.
On September 4, the OCU community performed the first service in the church after 2.5 years of a forced break. Believers have also cleaned the Church and plan to start regular services led by Father Rostyslav, the OCU priest. Amid these developments, the ROCinU still claimed a “seizure.”
The ROCinU deliberately inflames conflicts on religious grounds and refuses to recognize the decisions of the religious community and Ukrainian courts, even the Supreme Court of Ukraine. Instead of peaceful coexistence or unification into one Church independent of Moscow, the ROCinU continues to spread misinformation about every case where believers decide to leave the Moscow-led Church.
Moreover, the eparchy of the ROCinU in Vinnytsia region decided to “send a letter of protest to President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky” and asked media to cover the “seizure”. The ROCinU also asked believers to rally around a pro-Russian NGO, Myriany, which organized protests outside the Verkhovna Rada and the President’s Office, as well as those against Patriarch Bartholomew.
It should be reminded that in an interview to Spiritual Front of Ukraine, the incumbent parish rector in the village of Krasnosilky, OCU priest Rostyslav Protsanin, told that in ROCinU had once again submitted lawsuits to Ukrainian court, which, however, was dismissed because, despite the change of plaintiffs and lawyers, the very demands remained the same as before, in cases already lost by the ROCinU.
The OCU priest also added that after the community was re-registered, all property of the church and temple buildings were also registered with the OCU religious community. Father Rostyslav shared the reasons for the transition of parishioners to the OCU. As it turned out, the former rector, a priest with the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, did not allow a war veteran to take communion, and kept an icon of Russian Emperor Nicholas II at his altar.
The ROCunU also wants to grab a cathedral in Vinnytsia, where their former hierarch, now OCU Metropolitan Simeon (Shostatsky), serves.
