Expert: UOC today is three or five times larger than OCU

Researcher at the Center for the Study of Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen, Nikolai Mitrokhin, said that the number of parishes and the number of believers of the UOC is three or five times greater than that of the OCU. He said this in an interview with Dialog.Tut.

The expert said that he had come to this result after analyzing the parishes and the number of believers, as well as polling the heads of regional authorities in charge of the religious sphere.

Mitrokhin noted that such a position of the UOC in Ukrainian society makes it possible to consider it a national Church.

“I mean the number of actually existing, rather than nominally registered parishes, and the number of parishioners actually present at services, rather than so-called polls that the Ukrainian political establishment is guided by, since they show convenient numbers,” he said.

At the same time, the religious expert drew attention to the fact that the UOC unites people with different ideological thinking. In particular, according to Mitrokhin, the UOC united both autocephalists and anti-autocephalists.

“For me personally, the subject of interest in the UOC is the struggle of ideas, the struggle of different currents, which is largely tied to regional identity and the prevalence of a particular idea in different regional groups. <...> Why are people from Volhynia traditionally autocephalous? And people, for example, from conventional Gorlovka, from the central part of Donbass, are mostly anti-autocephalists,” he added.

As the UOJ reported, the ex-head of the DESS, Olena Bohdan, said that the UOC has twice as many priests as the OCU.