UOC spokesman: State must understand UOC believers are Ukraine’s citizens

Deputy Head of the UOC Department for External Church Relations Archpriest Nikolai Danilevich. Photo: news.church.ua

On December 11, 2019, the Deputy Head of the UOC Department for External Church Relations, Archpriest Nikolai Danilevich, explained in the program “Right to Belief” on the “1Kozak” channel that Ukraine needs a new religious policy so that all citizens understand that Ukraine is our common home.

“We would like the state to understand that the believers of the UOC – most numerous among all faiths – are the same citizens of Ukraine, the same Ukrainians. And only then we can build the country when we, all Ukrainians, we do it together, inclusively,” the clergyman noted.

According to him, this was what President Vladimir Zelensky spoke about in his speeches at the inauguration and on Independence Day.

In his opinion, “a new ideology, inclusive, is needed now so that all Ukrainians, those who live in Ukraine, understand that this is our common home: only then, politically, economically and religiously, we will develop and live peacefully”.

“We hope that our chaplains will be allowed into the army because it includes our believers, that hysteria with the renaming of the UOC will cease, and other distortions in the policies of the previous president will be corrected,” he added.

Commenting on Bill No. 0931 on combating discrimination Fr. Nikolai noted that all faiths and the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches are concerned about its wording since it is discriminatory.

“The Department for Religions and Nationalities gently hinted that they would not help us, religious organizations, in asserting our rights,” said Fr. Nikolai. “That is, on the one hand, they created the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, and on the other hand, we received such an answer.”

He emphasized: “Churches in our country should communicate with the state directly, without intermediaries.”

As reported, earlier the head of the UOC DECR Archpriest Nikolai Danilevich said that President Vladimir Zelensky wants to unite the country, and renaming the Church as a vestige of the ideology of the previous government only harms this.

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