Athens, October 11, 2019
Photo: spzh.news
Just before the hierarchs of the Greek Church plan to gather to discuss the ongoing Ukrainian crisis tomorrow, visiting clergy of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church distributed a book on the persecution against Ukrainian believers to the bishops.
The Bishops’ Council of the Greek Church is meeting in a regular session that ends today, and will gather again in an extraordinary session tomorrow to listen to and deliberate upon a report on Ukraine from Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and All Greece.
While the hierarchs are gathered together, some representatives from the Rivne Diocese of the Ukrainian Church took the opportunity to distribute the book, The Other Side of the Tomos: My Meetings With Real Christians by Andrei Vlasos, a Ukrainian publicist and journalist, inviting them to get acquainted with first-hand information about the suffering of the Ukrainian Orthodox faithful at the hands of the authorities and the schismatic church, Archpriest Viktor Zemlyanoy, the head of the Rivne Diocese’s Department for Inter-Confessional Issues, and a victim of persecution himself, told the Union of Orthodox Journalists.
“We offered brochures to all the hierarchs and clergy who are participating in the Council,” Fr. Viktor said. “There were a lot of clergy and bishops. In general, they took them with great interest; they read it, they looked, they approached us to ask questions. The bishops also sent their assistants to take extra copies and asked us about the situations described in it.”
Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus in particular expressed support for the canonical Church and its primate His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine, Fr. Viktor said.
Met. Seraphim has addressed the Ukrainian issue several times, noting that the previous government under Petro Poroshenko was playing a dangerous geopolitical game and merely using the Church as a tool, and that Constantinople has no right to hear appeals from Ukraine or to grant autocephaly to a group of schismatics there. The Metropolis of Piraeus has also called upon the Greek hierarchs not to recognize the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU).
At the same time, there was one bishop who quite aggressively argued with the Ukrainian representatives, insisting that, “All of this is not true; nobody beats anybody there.”
“We invited him to come, and we showed him a video of how people are beaten, how our churches are taken. After that, he immediately deflated a little,” Fr. Viktor said.
The hierarchs of the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU), including “Metropolitan” Epiphany Dumenko and “Archbishop” Evstraty Zorya have been openly lying in the media, claiming that all parish transitions have been peaceful, despite the fact that video recordings have been published showing the violence perpetrated by the supporters of the OCU.
“Metropolitan” Simeon Shostastsky, one of the two hierarchs who apostatized from the canonical Church and joined the schismatics last December, gave an interview to a Greek newspaper several days ago, where he repeated this lie, and even claimed that it is the clergy and faithful of the canonical Church who are violent and aggressive. At the end of his interview he even addressed himself to the Greek hierarchs, urging them to recognize the schismatic OCU.
In all, about 100 copies of the booklet were distributed on October 10 and 11.
The book, The Other Side of the Tomos: My Meetings With Real Christians, describes meetings with parishioners of the canonical Ukrainian Church in the Rivne Province who have managed to maintain their faithfulness to Christ and His Church even under the conditions of severe pressure and persecution from the authorities and schismatic activists. It tells about how parishioners of the UOC living in villages have had their churches taken away, about how the formerly close-knit and friendly villages became filled with anger and hatred after the tomos of autocephaly, with brother turning on brother and neighbor on neighbor, and how the faithful strive to preserve their inner peace and respond to evil with kindness.
