Drabinko: Filaret was promised Epiphany would be "Queen of England"
The “hierarch” of the OCU said that if it were not for Filaret, who “power-hungry,” the “Ukrainian Church” could have received autocephaly back in 1992.
The ex-metropolitan of the UOC and now "hierarch" of the OCU, Alexander Drabinko, believes that head of the UOC-KP Filaret Denisenko really only wants power and took part in the "unification council" because he was promised to have actual leadership of the newly formed structure. He said this in an interview published on the YouTube channel DROZDOV on January 6, 2021.
Commenting on the role of the head of the UOC-KP Filaret in receiving the Tomos, Drabinko stressed that “the granting of the Tomos is not his merit”.
“To be honest, in my opinion, he (Filaret) was promised that he would actually lead the church, while Vladyka Epiphany would be the ‘Queen of England’, i.e. he would only perform representative functions abroad,” he explained.
The "hierarch" of the OCU clarified that if these promises were fulfilled, he would not have gone to the "unification council".
“Filaret wants only power – well, I'm sorry to say so. The same story happened in 1992. <...> At that time, he was "dismissed" from the post of primate of the Ukrainian Church, and if he had been worried about the independence of the Ukrainian Church, if he had wanted a full-fledged autocephaly, all this could have been done back in 1992-93. <...> He should have stayed in the Church rather than cheated everyone that ‘Here I am’ and ‘I begin to build something new’. We must not forget that at that time it reached the point of ecclesiological heresy, when he wanted to create almost a family of parallel Local Orthodox Churches,” Drabinko stressed.
We will remind, earlier Filaret said that Poroshenko forced him to abandon the primacy in the OCU.
