Kiev, March 20, 2023
Photo: vzcz.church.ua The latest call from “Metropolitan” Epiphany Dumenko, the head of the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” is a manipulative and duplicitous lie, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s Department for External Church Relations said in a statement on Friday.
Earlier on Friday, Dumenko issued another provocative call for the brethren of the Holy Dormition-Kiev Caves Lavra to abandon the Orthodox Church and join his organization.
He begins by declaring that the state’s plans to evict the monks from their own home, that they built with their own hands is somehow not a form of persecution.
However, Dumenko and his OCU have greatly contributed to the perception of the canonical Church as an enemy of the state, which has led to the persecution. He continues:
For a long time, our church, the Ukrainian state, and society have tried to encourage the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine to finally end its subordination to the Russian center, which is completely under the control of the Kremlin administration and is used as an instrument of hybrid aggression against Ukraine.
Dumenko is well aware that in this time of war, to characterize the Ukrainian citizens of the Ukrainian Church as subordinate to the Kremlin is to put both a physical and symbolic bull’s eye on their backs. In fact, the UOC has been independently administered from Kiev for 30 years already, and in May, the UOC completely separated itself from the Moscow Patriarchate.
“I once again call on the brethren of the Lavra to contribute to the process of liberation from the Moscow yoke,” Dumenko says.
The canonical Ukrainian Church responds:
We remind you that the monks of the Kiev Caves Lavra themselves responded to such statements of Epiphany on January 27, 2023, where they stated that “we have been, are, and will be true and faithful to our canonical Church and its primate, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry,” and will not go to the OCU.
The Lavra is home to monks who are citizens of Ukraine. In the Lavra live Ukrainians, Ukrainian monasticism, and not Russian, as is often falsely said in our media. The “yoke of the Moscow Patriarchate” was not and does not exist in the Lavra.
The manipulation and duplicity of this appeal lies in the fact that on the one hand, the author declares the need to expel the “Moscow Patriarchate” from the Lavra, to which he obviously refers the Lavra monks, but if the OCU receives the Lavra, then the monks who were previously “Moscow” according to the head of the OCU will turn into “Ukrainian” and will be able to stay there. Also in the appeal, Epiphany declares his readiness to even allow monks to pray in the “ancient Slavic language,” if only they would stay in the Lavra, because everyone knows that there are few monks of their own in the OCU. In fact, on the shoulders of the monks of the monastery of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the head of the OCU wants to go to the Lavra and take advantage of their many years of work, assigning them to his structure.
In addition, at the beginning of his address, the mentioned author claims that finally “the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is returning to the Kiev Caves Lavra.” This isn’t true, because all Church and state documents say that it is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that celebrates Divine services in the Lavra today. There are no words “Moscow church” or “Moscow Patriarchate” in any official Church or state document. This is an artificially created cliche in the media, which is designed to divide Ukrainians and, unfortunately, it does so successfully. In the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, ministry isn’t carried out by Russian, but by Ukrainian clergy.
We consider untrue the accusations that the Lavra allegedly “consistently and deliberately turned into a center for promoting the ideology of the ‘Russian world,’” that the Lavra is allegedly “an instrument of struggle against Ukraine.” These are artificially invented cliches that have been persistently spread by the enemies of our Church for years.
The eviction of monks from the Lavra provokes Russians to continue to “defend the Orthodox,” giving them more and more arguments to justify their aggression against Ukraine, as the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov recently stated, making it clear that “the eviction of monks from the Lavra justifies the goals of the special operation.” Therefore, when Epiphany declares that “the enemy uses this historical event to split Ukrainian unity and sow misunderstandings between us,” the question arises who really gives the enemy reasons for this by such decisions and actions?
In addition, if the OCU’s “hearts were open to unity,” as the author of the appeal states, they would first condemn the violence against our communities that they are committing almost all over Ukraine today, and now slyly call for “unity.”
We want to remind, and we will always preserve this memory, that the real, historical and traditional Church of Ukraine is our Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has more than 1,000 years of history, while the OCU was created only 4 years ago from those parts that broke away from our Church about 30 years ago, namely the UOC-KP and the UAOC.
The pressure of the authorities on our Church, artificial obstacles in its activities, and a potential ban on the UOC will not contribute to the restoration of unity and dialogue with the OCU, to which they call us.
We believe that the intention to take the Kiev Caves Lavra from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and evict its inhabitants is a violation of the right to freedom of religion and a big mistake that will have a destructive impact on the image of our state, on the unity of the Ukrainian people, and religious peace.
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