The split in Ukrainian Orthodoxy was due to the deliberate actions on the part of Moscow, but Ukrainian society did not consent to such a situation.
That’s according to a religious expert Oleksandr Yefremenko who wrote the relevant post on Facebook.
The expert argues that it was based on a consolidated public demand that Constantinople resolved the issue of church division in less than a year, while Moscow had been deliberately delaying the process for 30 years.
“I’d like to emphasize that the split actually happened because of Moscow’s deliberate actions. Therefore, Moscow could not resolve the issue a priori because it wasn’t interested in its successful resolution. It was important for them to keep the Ukrainian Church in their sphere of influence,” Yefremenko wrote.
He notes that this state of affairs, against the background of Russian aggression, did not suit the Ukrainian nation. “Ukrainians saw that the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church reduced the Church to the level of ideological service to the Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine,” the expert wrote.
“The words of Moscow Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev) that the ROC will never release the Ukrainian Church have finally torn all the masks off,” the expert concluded. “It has become obvious that further Ukraine may suffer tragic consequences that threaten to escalate into an artificial religious war, of which Russian media had been warning so loudly. Therefore, in order to avoid these tragic consequences, a unification process was launched. As a result, the issue, which Moscow could not resolve for 30 years, was settled by Constantinople in less than a year.”
According to Oleksandr Yefremenko, Russia still fails to accept this fact, and “it shows that it’s Moscow, not Constantinople, lives in its fictional world, with its latest Pharisaic perception of reality, where everyone around is a heretic and schismatic, and only the Moscow Patriarchate has a special, unique canonicity.”
It should be recalled that Oleksandr Yefremenko, a religious expert, said that all the communities that united under the OCU took over their temples by court decisions, so this is not a “seizure,” as the ROCinU claims. He also noted that Filaret’s defiant actions found no support among the clergy and the Ukrainian society.
