The granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is “a secular event,” Chancellor of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Antoniy (Pakanych) said.
“I would like to emphasize that the Christian holiday should not be outshined by a certain secular event. There were a lot of such events in our history. So, those events, which were believed to be great some time ago, then became shameful both for the church history and for those people, who signed that sort of documents,” he said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Sunday.
The documents that have been earlier signed caused some problems to the Christians, the metropolitan said.
“Various documents were signed, both unions and tomos, but all of this unfortunately very often caused some difficulties in the life to the Christians, and only those people, who deal with the church history, are aware of them now,” he said.
On October 11, 2018, the Constantinople Patriarchate’s Synod in Istanbul invalidated its decree of 1686 on the transfer of the Kyiv Metropolinate to Moscow, declared the creation of a metochion in Kyiv, and rehabilitated the leaders of the self-proclaimed Orthodox Churches in Ukraine. In response, the Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate declared the full severance of relations with Constantinople.
On January 5, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew signed a tomos granting autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine at the St. George’s Cathedral in Istanbul.
