Warsaw, April 5, 2019
Photo: pravlife.org
The Bishops’ Council of the Polish Orthodox Church met on Tuesday under the chairmanship of His Beatitude Metropolitan Sawa of Warsaw and All Poland, after which it published a statement on the Ukrainian issue on the official website of the Polish Church.
According to the report, the hierarchs got acquainted with correspondence received on the Ukrainian issue from a number of fraternal Local Churches: Constantinople, Alexandria, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Albania, Cyprus, Bulgaria, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and Ukraine, as well as from a group of faithful from the Polish Church and from the UN Human Rights Council.
Having read the various letters, the Council resolved to confirm its position on the Church situation in Ukraine reflected in the resolutions of May 9, 2018 and November 15, 2018 and in various letters of the primate Met. Sawa.
In May, the Holy Synod stated: “There are certain schismatic groups in Ukraine which must first repent and return to the canonical Church. Only then can we discuss the issue of providing autocephaly… We must not be led by the political climate in questions of dogma and the canons.”
In November, they wrote: “The Holy Bishops’ Council forbids the priests of the Polish Orthodox Church from having liturgical and prayerful contact with the ‘clergy’ of the so-called Kiev Patriarchate and the so-called ‘Autocephalous Orthodox Church,’ which have committed much evil in the past.”
In January, the Polish Church specifically rejected Patriarch Bartholomew’s request to recognize the new church in Ukraine created on December 15.
Met. Sawa has written several letters in support of the canonical Ukrainian Church. In October, he wrote to Pat. Bartholomew, calling on him to call a pan-Orthodox council to resolve the Ukrainian issue, and in December he wrote a letter of support to His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine.
In particular, in a letter sent on March 13, speaking on behalf of the Council, Met. Sawa noted that the Polish Church has and continues to advocate for the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church, meaning the canonical Church under Met. Onuphry.
“The autocephaly of the Church in Ukraine should be based on the dogmatic and canonical norms of the entire Church, and not groups of schismatics. Those who have departed from the Church and were deprived of their clerical ordinations cannot constitute a healthy Church organism. These non-canonical actions violate Eucharistic and inter-Orthodox unity,” the statement reads.
It is also noted that the Polish Church is cooperating with other Local Churches to help regularize Church life in Ukraine.
Further, the Polish bishops call on all who hold Orthodoxy dear to pray to God to grant unity to our fraternal Ukraine.
And, in response to erroneous information, the hierarchs note that three bishops who had been received into the Polish Church from the so-called “Orthodox Church of Portugal” of the Florinite Old Calendarist church in the 1990s were all “re-“consecrated as bishops by hierarchs of the Polish Church.
Several Local Orthodox Churches have expressed their serious concern about the fact that Constantinople received all the schismatic clergy and hierarchs of the Ukrainian schismatic churches without re-ordination and re-consecration. Moreover, the arguments that Patriarch Bartholomew has made in support of this decision have been shown to be false.
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