After the large-scale invasion, members of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches called on the representative of the UOC (in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate) to repent before the Ukrainian people, and that the people would forgive them, but the clergy preferred to wait the crisis out.
Viktor Yelenskyi, a religious scholar and head of the State Service for Ethnic Policies and Freedom of Conscience, told about this in an interview with Ukrinform.
“When, after the large-scale invasion, a meeting of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations was held, its members called on the representative of the UOC (MP): repent to the Ukrainian people. For talking about the ‘civil war’ and about Crimea having ‘drifted away by itself’, for refusing to honor Ukrainian soldiers… Repent, and the people will forgive you. But the clergy did not want to change anything, they preferred to wait it all out,” he said.
According to him, in May 2022, the Synod of the UOC (MP) declared that the very existence of the OCU provoked a large-scale war.
“This is a very important and demonstrative condition. Indeed, the desire of Ukrainians to have their own church angered the aggressor. And so did the desire to speak their own language, have their own anthem and coat of arms, their own statehood, live their own life after all.
After all, the declared “de-Nazification” is nothing but de-Ukrainization, which the most outspoken Kremlin propagandists even emphasize. And the synod people are right – if they had agreed to be Russian vassals, they would not have “jumped out from under Moscow.” According to Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivskyi, then there wouldn’t have been a war. How dare Ukrainians be willing to be free, right?
It is in this deep, unarticulated, repressed envy of the rebel who dared to break the shackles that you did not dare to break yourself, that this fierce rejection of the OCU on the part of the UOC (MP) episcopate actually lies. If you read and listen to the spokesmen for the UOC (MP), their main foe is not Putin, but the OCU; not Kirill, who calls for the annihilation of Ukraine, but Patriarch Bartholomew, who calls on the world to stand by our country,” Yelenskyi noted.
