Theologian Dmytro Gorevoy says the accusations by the ROC against the Ecumenical Patriarchate for interfering in another Local Church are false.
“If Moscow manages to somehow condemn Bartholomew for his non-Moscow interpretation of ecclesiology (church science), it is unlikely to help the ROC in the situation of Ukraine. Because from the narrative of a misunderstanding of primacy, they deduce the following thesis – they say that Bartholomew interfered in the affairs of another local church. But this isn’t true,” Gorevoy said, according to Radio Svoboda.
He stressed that the Ecumenical Patriarchate did not interfere in another Church, because “before granting autocephaly, the Ecumenical Patriarchate repealed the act of 1686, regained power over the illegally appropriated ROC Kyiv Metropolis, and then handed the tomos to its own part. Thus, from October 2018 to January 2019, all Ukrainian Orthodoxy was part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate until the tomos was granted. And if there was an encroachment in this case, it was exclusively on the part of Moscow against the Kyiv Metropolis.”
“Phanar acted very cautiously in matters of autocephaly. The patriarchs of Constantinople have been granting autocephaly exclusively to their territories, that is, they independently reduced their own power in favor of the new churches. This was the case with the Hellenic, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, and Czech churches. Even the Georgian Church didn’t get an autocephaly from Constantinople because, as is written in the tomos, it only preserved and confirmed what had existed for centuries, that is, the independent Georgian Church. And Patriarch Demetrius of Constantinople did not claim spiritual authority over Tbilisi – he clearly writes in the tomos that the mentioned church once received autocephaly from Antioch,” Gorevoy stressed.
