UOC metropolitan and clerics call on their Church to repent before Uniates
Met. Alexander (Drabinko) and the former UOC spokesman Protopriest Grigory Kovalenko believe the UOC's position is not in line with the Gospel and historical truth.
They signed a statement of relevant content together with representatives of the UOC KP and the UGCC following the results of the seminar “Truth, Justice and Reconciliation between Russia, Ukraine and the EU”, reports “Orthodoxy in Ukraine”.
In a joint statement, the participants "state with regret" that "neither the Russian Orthodox Church, nor the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) has yet acknowledged their complicity in the tragic events of the twentieth century to ban and liquidate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, as well as and in other crimes of the atheistic totalitarian Soviet regime against freedom of conscience and human dignity".
“We regretfully have to state that the Russian Orthodox Church fully shares the responsibility for the formation of an ideology of confrontation,” says the document signed by the participants of the seminar.
The statement emphasizes that receiving the Tomos is only an intermediate stage on the way to the full unity of the Ukrainian Church: “the dialogue should be continued between the influential centres of the Christian world – Rome, Constantinople and Moscow”.
The seminar participants also concluded that the future Local Church must break free from the shackles of the past and utter the words “forgive and ask for forgiveness” in relation to the Sister Churches in Ukraine and abroad.
The statement was also signed by the Director of the Department for Religious Affairs of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine Andrei Yurash, the President of the UCU and the UGCC bishop Boris Gudziak, the spokesperson of the UOC KP Yevstratiy Zoria, a number of representatives of the UGCC.
As the UOJ reported, earlier Metropolitan Alexander (Drabinko) of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky and Vishnevoye questioned the canonicity of the anathema laid on the head of the Kiev Patriarchate Filaret, and Protopriest Georgy Kovalenko, the former spokesperson of the UOC, now the rector of the Open Orthodox University of Saint Sophia the Wisdom, stated that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church today has no love and respect for each other, and in Ukraine there is a request among the people and the clergy for the Tomos.
