KDAiS criticizes State Ethnopolitics’ expertise on UOC Statute
The KDAiS Secretary noted that the conclusions of the State Service are erroneous, since the expert group overlooked all the norms and concepts in its expert opinion.
Archimandrite Mitrofan, secretary of the Kyiv Theological Academy and Seminary, said that experts from the State Ethnopolitics examined documents that had nothing to do with the UOC. He wrote about this in his article for Dialog.TUT.
According to him, the conclusion of the examination does not contain a definition of the basic concepts that the expert group of religious scholars operated on: “In the absence of a clear definition of these concepts, the expert group operated on them rather arbitrarily, giving their own interpretation, on which the objectivity and professionalism of the expert opinion ultimately depended,” wrote the archimandrite.
Commenting on the evidence of experts about the existence of a relation between the UOC and the Moscow Patriarchate, the secretary of the KDAiS noted that autocephaly does not need such a document as “tomos”.
“Historically, the documents that granted the status of autocephaly did not necessarily have such a name. If we look at the Eastern Patriarchates, they don’t have Tomos at all: their status was fixed by the decision of the Ecumenical Councils without any special document,” he writes. <...> “From this we can conclude that autocephaly does not require such a document as ‘tomos’, and even more so only with such a name. The main thing is that an appropriate conciliar decision be made. What form this decision will be drawn up and notified is a technical and secondary matter.”
In addition, Archimandrite Mitrofan added that the status of the UOC in many respects exceeds the level of independence of the autocephalous Churches.
“Consequently, not using the concept of autocephaly, but the expression ‘complete autonomy and independence,’ the UOC fills them with real content, which in a number of positions exceeds the level of independence of formally autocephalous Churches, including the OCU,” he noted.
As reported by the UOJ, the expertise of the State Ethnopolitics referred to the UOC as a "structural subdivision of the ROC".
