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ROC and UOC-MP don’t share Crimean Cossacks’ wish to change name of UOC to Russian Orthodox Church

21.07.2011, 10:11
Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) commented on the request of the Crimean Cossacks to subordinate the UOC-MP to the direct rule of Patriarch Kirill and to rename the UOC-MP to the Russian Orthodox Church, Religion in Ukraine reports with reference to Kommersant.

Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) commented on the request of the Crimean Cossacks to subordinate the UOC-MP to the direct rule of Patriarch Kirill and to rename the UOC-MP to the Russian Orthodox Church, Religion in Ukraine reports with reference to Kommersant.

The ROC is surprised by such requests. “Such statements are nothing more than the personal opinion of the organizers of the campaign. It has a right to exist, but the Russian Orthodox Church does not support it. The current format of the existence of the UOC-MP is a compromise between those who want full union with Moscow and those who want autocephaly. There are no canons for the UOC-MP to be directly subordinate to Patriarch Kirill,” said the publishing director of Department of Inter-Orthodox Relations of the Department for External Church Relations of the ROC, archpriest Ihor Yakymchuk.

A similar position is shared by the UOC-MP. Head of the Church and Culture Synodal Department of the UOC-MP Mother Superior Seraphima (Shevchyk) described the Crimean organization’s appeal as political. “The church is trying to unite a huge flock, in which there are a variety of believers. We are not the church of Galicia, not the church of Donetsk, Metropolitan Volodymyr tries to understand all the Ukrainian people,” said the mother superior. “The Cossacks went against the blessing of the church, and this should alert the faithful,” she said. “If they try to use our flock for a political agenda, we are against this.”

We remind that the leader of the Sobol Cossack community, Vitalii Khramov, recently stated that “our church caries a totally unacceptable name – the UOC-MP. It is unacceptable for the clergy to not be ethnically the same as its flock. We believe that in the Russian state in Ukraine there should only be Russian pastors. We are all equal before God, but there is earthly life, and to understand our Russian soul, we must be served by our Russian priests.”