Expert: Only our Church has the right to choose what it should be called

Religious expert Yuri Reshetnikov. Photo: news.church.ua

Only the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on its own has the right to determine its official name. And no one can rename it. Religious expert Yuriy Reshetnikov said this at a round table meeting "Three years of attempts to forcibly rename the Ukrainian Orthodox Church: consequences, assessments, comments", held at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra on December 20.

“Only our Church has the right to determine what to be called. The UOC unites tens of millions of Ukrainian citizens who are citizens of our country, who pay taxes, who work for the benefit of our state,” the Information and Educational Department of the UOC quotes the religious expert.

“In addition, we are convinced that the law under consideration was adopted both in violation of the Constitution and in violation of international regulatory documents, therefore we are convinced that it should be canceled. So we will exchange views on how it may be achieved, and together we will try to find options for our further actions,” Yuri Reshetnikov emphasized.

Archpriest Nikolai Danilevich, Deputy Head of the Department for External Church Relations of the UOC, recalled during the roundtable that December 20 marks three years since the law on the so-called renaming was adopted during the lobbying of former President Poroshenko. According to him, the law is absolutely manipulative and propagandist and is directed against the largest confession of Ukraine.

As the UOJ reported, on December 20, 2018, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law obliging the UOC to indicate its affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church in its name. On December 22, this law was signed by Petro Poroshenko. The UOC began to defend its rights in court.

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