Metropolitan Jonathan: Tomos from Phanar did not work
The head of the Tulchin Eparchy believes that by granting autocephaly to the OCU, Patriarch Bartholomew led Ukraine to social and religious discord.
On January 13, Metropolitan Jonathan of Tulchin and Bratslav published a commentary to “Tomos did not work: instead of the unity of the Orthodox world, we have its split and ricocheting blow to the authority of Patriarch Bartholomew in Ukraine”.
Vladyka notes that despite the position taken by Patriarch Bartholomew as the "guarantor of the Church-wide unity", the Tomos he signed led to a split in Orthodoxy.
“The “ecumenical father’ Bartholomew sowed new grains of social and religious discord in Ukraine with his Tomos for the OCU,” said Metropolitan Jonathan. “<...> having taken under their virtual "Byzantine" wing those who, through violence and deceit, seized the churches of the canonical UOC for years, he, alas, turned into an unloved and cold-blooded ‘stepfather’, a hierarch living in Turkish Istanbul."
According to the metropolitan, the faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will remember for long the “politically motivated metamorphosis” of the Phanar’s head.
The hierarch recalls that history remembers the betrayal of Constantinople after the advent of communist rule.
“Historians know about the Phanar’s messages to the holy confessor elected by the Local Council of the Russian Church, His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, with an outrageous demand to immediately resign ‘so as not to interfere with the power to build a new life’. Historians also know about the pseudo-canonical recognition by Istanbul-Constantinople of the renewed, schismatic "red Church" that arose in Soviet Russia with the help of the Bolsheviks,” the bishop notes.
As reported, Metropolitan Jonathan of Tulchin and Bratslav believes that the Ukrainian people will not fall into the “fatherly” embrace of the Phanar, which accepted schismatics from the OCU without repentance and proper consecration.
