Kiev, August 16, 2022
Photo: strana.ua
Alexander Drabinko, one of the two formerly canonical bishops who decided to leave the Church and join the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” again finds himself at the center of a controversy.
A video published on the “On the Church and People” Telegram channel shows Drabinko cursing at women who refuse to join the schismatic OCU and threatening physical violence against the local canonical priest.
“The OCU is a structure whose representatives use force when seizing churches, whose hierarchs allow themselves to beat women (remember Adrian Kulik) or to swear when talking with people, as Alexander Drabinko does in this video,” the channel writes.
In the video, Drabinko is meeting with Orthodox parishioners and OCU activists in a parish library, discussing a church that was seized, where the canonical priest dismantled the altar table and removed liturgical utensils and icons to save them from desecration by the schismatics.
The former hierarch begins swearing and declares that the priest’s “hands should be broken for what he did to the church when the altar was dismantled.”
The video has caused an uproar among supporters of the OCU as well.
“We didn’t expect this even from Vladyka Alexander,” writes the pro-OCU Telegram channel Churcher. “No. We know very well how you speak behind closed doors, Vladyka, but talking to women like that?... Do we need to show emotional instability instead of wisdom?”
Recall that a scandal erupted early last year when Drabinko’s personal correspondences in Telegram revealed scandalous and compromising material, including of an explicit homosexual nature, prompting a number of OCU hierarchs to call for him to be excluded from any important Church-wide projects or dialogues with other Churches.
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