A recent newspiece on OrthoChristian.com, the representative news site of the Moscow Patriarchate, reported that “Patriarch” Philaret Denisenko, the decades-long leader of the “Kyiv Patriarchate” of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, refused to sign a document pledging fealty to the statutes of the newly formed “Church” structure presently known as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
This piece is reprinted almost entirely from its original posting on orthochristian.com. We hope it offers a clear perspective that shared across the Orthodox Christian world regarding the recent moves by the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, in regards to the legitimization of two canonically schismatic church communities in Ukraine.
TASS reported on September 28 that the plans of the Ecumenical Patriarch to grant complete independence (“autocephaly”) to the schismatic Ukrainian Orthodox Church signal the Ecumenical Patriarch’s own aspirations to power.
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, chief of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations described the situation told the Izvestia daily news on Friday:
The big news in geopolitics in Ukraine and Russia the last several weeks has been about the status of a church more than about the fighting in Donbass or the assassination of the leader of the Donetsk Republic. However, the uncanonical (this is synonymous with “illegal” in matters concerning the Eastern Orthodox Church) efforts by Ukraine’s so-called “Kyiv Patriarchate” to leapfrog from schismatic status to the official national Church of Ukraine have been assisted by – you guessed it – the United States.
And it is working.
In a tit for tat move, the Ukrainian government has added the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church to its doxing website “Mirotvorets” (“Peacemaker”), labeling him an “enemy of Ukraine.”
It seems Ukrainian nationalistic politicians and religious schismatics didn’t appreciate that he referred to them as enemies of all Slavic peoples, as The Duran previously reported.
