The UOC had earlier also been “independent”, so the amendments to its Statute, adopted by the Council on May 27, removed provisions that could have given rise to ambiguous interpretations of its independence. But to declare autocephaly would be to go into a split.
“In fact, yesterday we defined the format of our church as absolutely autocephalous,” Klyment told BBC. According to the cleric, the refusal to use this term is quite easy to explain: “Autocephaly is not proclaimed, autocephaly is obtained. If we had declared autocephaly yesterday, it would have ended in a split and a global crisis in Ukrainian Orthodoxy.”
Metropolitan Klyment assured that Metropolitan Onufriy is no longer a member of the ROC Synod: “Whoever is a member of the ROC Synod determines the statute of the ROC. But this document does not apply to the UOC because we have had our own statute for three decades. It does not mention the commitment of His Beatitude [Primate of the UOC] to be a member of the Synod of the ROC.”
The Metropolitan of the UOC-MP also said that in the new version of the statute, there is allegedly “not a single word about Russia, the ROC, or Moscow. “In addition, it is specifically stated that [the UOC leadership center is located in Kyiv.”
