Spokesman for UOC KP: When states collapse, Churches disappear

Spokesman for the UOC KP Eustratiy Zoria

Churches disappear when states disappear. This opinion was expressed in an interview with "Credo" byEustratiy Zoria, the spokesman for the Kiev “Patriarchate”.

According to him, an independent Church can fully exist only in an independent state, therefore, in Ukraine there were no grounds for autocephaly while it was “part of the Moscow imperial project”.

“And that is why Metropolitan Filaret, as soon as the Ukrainian state became independent, immediately embarked on this path,” Zoria noted. “Yes, there was no state – it was not possible to have an autocephalous Church. An independent state arose – immediately, there were grounds for having it. Actually, as it happened to the Georgian, Bulgarian and Romanian Churches.”

Answering the question of how to deal with such independent states as Belarus, Moldova, Latvia, Kazakhstan, which have no autocephalies, Zoria said that these examples only confirm the rule.

“In Latvia, the Orthodox are an overwhelming minority. How can a local autocephalous Church arise?” noted Zoria, adding that in the future due to the changes that are awaiting the Russian Federation, including territorial ones, new Churches will arise in these territories.

“As soon as the Moscow Patriarchal centre weakens, and it weakens sooner or later due to the weakening of the Kremlin centre, new local Churches will arise along these lines. And, in my opinion, this is the prospect of the next decades, including if one of the possible geopolitical scenarios is realized, when “Chinese power will grow with Siberia”, I’m more than sure that from the Orthodox in Siberia very quickly even not autonomous but autocephalous Chinese Orthodox Church will arise,” suggests the spokesman for the UOC KP.

Earlier, the Primate of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Irinej stated in a letter to Patriarch Bartholomew that modern secular states use the Church to serve their ideology, and to achieve this goal they resort to painful ethnophyletism and a state-centric idea. This, in turn, "leads only to one thing – the threat to the universal character of the Church".

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