Epiphany: Churches that don't accept OCU don't accept their own autocephaly
The head of the OCU is convinced that the state of Universal Orthodoxy “basically depends on recognition of the OCU’s autocephaly”.
Anyone who does not recognize the autocephaly of the OCU questions the whole mechanism by which other Churches received autocephaly. About this in an interview with Ukrinform said the head of the new religious structure Epiphany Dumenko.
According to him, today, the OCU “is moving quite intensively in the direction of recognition of its autocephaly by the Hellas Orthodox Church”. He believes that after someone is the first to recognize the OCU, the rest "will already find it easier to do it".
Answering the journalist's question about why the process of recognizing our autocephaly is so slow-paced, Dumenko noted that “in this case, Moscow stands in the way”, which “rather intensively tries to influence the hierarchs of all Local Orthodox Churches to prove that this act on the part of the Ecumenical Patriarch is ‘non-canonical, invalid’, etc.".
Despite this hindrance, Epiphany is convinced that “in due course, the Churches, one after another, will recognize our autocephalous status”.
In his opinion, “if some of the Churches do not recognize this act, then, accordingly, they also cast doubt on their autocephaly, which was given to a particular Church in the same way, and this was clearly voiced by one of the hierarchs who was tasked by the Church of Greece to explore this issue. He said that “we do not even have the right to argue on this issue, we must simply support and recognize this act from the Ecumenical Patriarch to recognize the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church, because unless we do this, we question the whole mechanism, which existed until now, and we question even the autocephalous status of our church.”
As the UOJ wrote earlier, Mikheil Saakashvili discussed with Epiphany the anticipated process of recognition of the OCU by other Local Orthodox Churches, including the Georgian Orthodox Church.
