Kiev, January 11, 2019
Photo: Facebook More than 2,000 Ukrainian viewers of the station Maxi TV cast their vote recently on how they view the tomos of autocephaly granted by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople to “Metropolitan” Epiphany Dumenko and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Of the three options: “historical event,” “everyday event,” and “political technology,” the third one by a landslide, with 95% of the votes.
The results were posted on Facebook in a screen shot by Archpriest Gennady Shikl, a cleric of the Cherson Diocese of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Only 4% of the more than 2,100 voters consider the granting of the tomos an “historical event,” and 1% consider it an “everyday event.”
Similar results that don’t bode well for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has made the tomos a major point in his bid for reelection, and for the new nationalist church come from a survey conducted by the Sofia center for social research that shows that nearly one-third of Ukrainians believe the creation of the new structure will provoke conflicts and more than half believe the government is violating the constitutional principle of the separation of Church and state, according to ukranews.com.
The survey was conducted among 2,003 adults from all regions of Ukraine between December 16 and 25.
30.9% of respondents believe the creation of the new “autocephalous church” will provoke conflict, while 27.4% believe it promotes unity. The rest believe there will be no effect or could not answer.
52.5% of respondents believe the Ukrainian state is violating the constitutional principle of the separation of Church and state in its actions surrounding the autocephaly process, while 25.8% believe the government has upheld the principle.
39.3% of respondents expressed a positive attitude towards the holding of the “unification council” on December 15, while the remaining 60% expressed a negative or disinterested attitude or found it difficult to answer.
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