Met Anthony: Not a single Local Church recognizes OCU in its current status

Metropolitan Anthony (Pakanich). Photo – Alexander Goncharov.

The receiving of theTomos did not lead to unity but only heightened the contradictions: there were three church structures, and with the arrival of the Tomos, there emerged the fourth one, said Metropolitan Anthony (Pakanich) of Borispol and Brovary, Chancellor of the UOC, in an interview with Realist.

“There are no legal documents on the liquidation of the Kiev Patriarchate,” noted Metropolitan Anthony, explaining the situation with the “merger” or automatic self-dissolution of the Ukrainian schismatic structures to become one OCU. “Moreover, why are only our seized or transferred temples re-registered as the new structure of the OCU, why is this not done with the churches of the Kiev Patriarchate and the UAOC? Why are they juridically still listed as former structures?”

Moreover, Vladyka stressed that at first, after the receiving of the Tomos, the churches of the UOC, which were voluntarily leaving it, changed the legal registration not for the OCU but for the Kiev Patriarchate.

“But our lawyers did not see any document on the re-registration of the “Kiev Patriarchate” for the “OCU”. And according to our information, no one is going to do this in the future,” the UOC Chancellor added.

In his opinion, this is due to the fact that “in this artificial institution there is no trust to each other”: “According to the information we have, in most temples of the UAOC they don’t make a liturgical mention of either Epiphany or even Makary, their ex-primate, but only Patriarch Bartholomew.

Regarding public statements by Epiphany, the head of the OCU, that the recognition of the church structure headed by him is already underway, Vladyka Anthony noted that this is “again a deception, just like the church structure itself which was also born from deception”.

“I emphasize – not a single Local Autocephalous Church recognizes the OCU. On the contrary, there are reports that in the future they are not going to recognize this structure as it is today,” he said, pointing out, in particular, to the problem of recognizing ordinations.

“We constantly communicate with other Local Orthodox Churches, and they share the pain of our Church. The Antiochian, Serbian, Polish, Cypriot, Albanian, Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia consider that the Ukrainian problem is so serious that it needs to be addressed in a conciliar way – by the judgment of all Ecumenical Orthodoxy,” the UOC Chancellor said and recalled the recent address of the Primates of the four oldest Orthodox Churches, who called for the protection of churches in Ukraine from seizures, whatever the reasons for these seizures could be.

As the UOJ reported, the Orthodox Church of Moldova condemned the anti-canonical intervention of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the church life of Ukraine, expressing deep concern about the persecution of the clergy and believers of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

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