Rep of UOC-KP: Metropolitan Volodymyr Was Confused By Compilers of His Report For Council of ROC

The spokesman of the Kyivan Patriarchate, Archbishop Yevstratii (Zoria) said in a commentary to the Orthodox Reviewer that the address, to which Metropolitan Volodymyr referred in his report read out at the Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, never existed in the form in which it was presented by UOC-Moscow Patriarchate. “Unfortunately, whether deliberately or not, the persons who had prepared the report confused both the metropolitan and all the readers or listeners of the report,” he said.

According to the archbishop, “the text mixes up two principally different events which have some similarities, namely, the address of the Holy Synod to the heads of the Local Churches, heads of the Roman Catholic Church and Church of England  and the address to the head of UGCC (Synod Journal 37).”

Archbishop Yevstratii noted that the manipulation of the texts and mixing them up indicate the lack of theological and canonical arguments on the part of the Moscow Patriarchate regarding the “shameful practice of re-baptizing.”

The spokesman of the Kyivan Patriarchate explained that “the two mentioned addresses are mixed up as one and the same thing. The author noticed that there was no responses to the first address even though they were not asked for or expected  by anyone. And this is interpreted by UOC-MP as a support of the shameful practice of “re-baptizing” for some reason. At the same time, the response of the Head of UGCC, which apparently dissatisfied Moscow, is presented as some exception.”

So reported the web site of UOC-KP.