UOC-Moscow Patriarchate Denies Involvement in Address Demanding to Grant It Status of Dominant Church

Representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) claim they have nothing to do with the address of the community of the UOC-MP requesting that President Viktor Yanukovych grant the UOC-MP the “status of the dominant” church and stop integration into the EU, says a statement by Archbishop Oleksandr Drabynko of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, the head of the Department of External Church Relations of UOC-MP, reports UNIAN.

“The Secretariat of the Kyivan Metropolitanate of the UOC does hereby state that the statement of the official position of the UOC as to church-state relations and the addresses and documents of official character, according to the Statutes of the UOC, is within the capacity of only the Holy Council and Holy Synod of the UOC led by its head. A personal public position voiced by the faithful of the UOC, from the point of view of the church authorities, is of a private character and therefore, should not be viewed as the position of the whole fullness of the church,” stresses the document.  

Therefore, according to the archbishop, the address of the meeting of the community of the UOC, referred to by the press, is not the official church position of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-MP. 

“We ask journalists to pay attention to this fact and approach the press office of the UOC for official commentaries,” said the archbishop.

As it was reported, on April 14 the media published information on the address of the community of the UOC-MP requesting that President Viktor Yanukovych grant the UOC-MP the “status of the dominant” church and stop integration into the EU.

In particular, the participants of the April 10 meetng passed the address to Yanukovych, “whom the Orthodox community actively supported at the presidential election with a call to stop integrating Ukraine in the strange and hostile Western civilization-state structure, the European Union.” The believers called the president, prime minister and Supreme Council to “grant the canonical Orthodox Church in Ukraine the status of the dominant church.”

The meeting also passed a decision to approach the authorities with a demand to grant the Russian language the status of the second state language.