Patriarch Filaret: Authorities Legalized Revival of UAOC to Prevent Revival of Greek Catholic Church

“I did not support the Autocephalous Church which was already in existence at that time as I knew that it would not be legalized for long in the USSR. It was legal as far as the role envisaged for it by the Soviet regime prevented the spread of the Greek Catholic Church all over Ukraine. And if the Soviet Union continued to exist, the Autocephalous Church would eventually cease to exist: it would be liquidated in the same way as in the past,” Patriarch Filaret, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate, said in an interview to RISU on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which voted for the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church on November 1-3, 1991.

The patriarch spoke about three stages of the revival of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church from 1921 to 1989. Patriarch Filaret associates the third revival of the autocephalous Church at the time of USSR only with efforts to oppose the UGCC.

“Why did the authorities allow the revival in 1989? One day, the archives will be opened and everything will become known; but in my opinion, the authorities allowed this revival to prevent the revival of the Greek Catholic Church. It was then that the UGCC began to emerge from the underground, found support in patriotic circles, the forces who wanted to have a Ukrainian state. The authorities could not stop that revival any more but in order to counteract it, they resorted to the following: they allowed the autocephalous Orthodox Church to be revived,” stressed Patriarch Filaret.

According to him, another motive was to neutralize the influence of Galicia on Ukraine: “They probably thought, Let there be a struggle, a religious struggle in Galicia, it will be a struggle inside. And the rest of Ukraine will hear about that struggle, about violence and taking away churches, and they will be afraid to support the patriotic forces.”