No Arguments? Accuse of Being Unpatriotic!

Yesterday's newscast of the "17 Channel" covering details of the inter-religious conflict in Ternopil region, clearly illustrated what is actually happening in inter-church relations in Ukraine at the moment.

On behalf of the UOC Rev. Georgiy Prokopchuk, whose parish is within thirty kilometers from the conflict site, comments on pre-conditions of the collision in Katerynivka. He clearly and convincingly explained to the audience and the broadcaster that the fight was a result of several months’ aggression, accusations, provocations and deceit, and the collision of September 21 was just an outburst of what had been fomenting for more than a week.

Archpriest Georgiy Prokopchuk disproved all the myths that representatives of the UOC-KP and the "Right Sector" caught red-handed had spread like "undeniable truth" for the few days that had passed since the fight in Katerynivka. After additional explanations of the senior priest of the UOC Rev. Fr. Sergiy Gladun, no questions of principle were left. However, the opponent in the discussion, a representative of the UOC-KP in Ternopil region, Archpriest Eugeniy Zapletniuk, apparently without valid counterarguments, said for a start that the documentation on the property rights for the church in Katerynivka belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was "no longer valid" as being passed in Soviet times. We find it pointless to further comment on other “legal” arguments of the Kiev Patriarchate.

The most interesting thing for the author of these lines was that the priest of the UOC-KP traditionally brought the dispute to the demagogy, accusing the UOC believers of being ... unpatriotic. We quote verbatim: "They do not know the history, the language of Ukraine". The fact that Father Georgiy and Father Sergiy opposed him in Ukrainian probably did not contradict the worldview of "patriots".

In the video about the events in Katerynivka one can clearly see a resident of a neighboring village, a parishioner of St. George UOC community, who works as a cashier in the Orthodox parish. To the attention of Mr. Zapletniuk, it is this respectable woman who has been studying the history of construction of the church in Katerynivka for a long time. She has worked in libraries and archives, gathering information about the masters, how the church was under construction, when it was completed, how the Orthodox community of the village has lived for the last almost a hundred years.

Probably, all these data are not the story of Ternopil region in the view of the spokesperson of the Kiev Patriarchate? We will not ask a question what page they have entered into the life of the region. This is clearly seen in the video and heard in the comments of people affected by the artificially fomented conflict in the village.

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