UOC DECR: Church easily collected million "live" signatures in its defense
It is important that letters urging the authorities to abolish anti-church laws be signed by real people – active UOC parishioners, Fr. Nikolai Danilevich emphasized.
More than a million believers have signed the appeal for the abolition of laws directed against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and all these are “living signatures” that cannot be questioned. Archpriest Nikolai Danilevich, the deputy head of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the UOC, wrote about this in his tg-channel.
“In fact, it was not so much the number of signatures that was important for us, but the very presence of letters from parishes, even if there were only 10 signatures under them,” the spokesman of the UOC noted. “It is important that there are live signatures so that no one signs for others. Accordingly, no one in power or among the enemies of the Church could question these letters and these signatures."
He explained that signatures at parishes, as a rule, were collected only in the church and only among those people who came to services on a regular basis. Thus, only active parishioners signed the appeal, and even not all of them – some did not have time, and some, in particular, elderly believers, now do not attend temples due to the situation with the coronavirus.
The clergyman stated that “this million signatures were collected quite easily, without any pressure, exclusively among active parishioners, and if, in an epidemic, when there were much fewer people in churches, the UOC easily collected 1,060,238 signatures, then how many would the Church have collected if the task had been to organize the maximum number of signatures?"
“I remember that in 2018, in June, we collected 400 thousand signatures in a week against the fact that Phanar interfered in Ukrainian church affairs. During the week. Easy. On the move. There was no covid then. I am writing this so that all of us and all of them are aware of the scale of our Church,” summed up Archpriest Nikolai Danilevich.
Earlier, the UOJ wrote that more than a million believers signed an appeal to Zelensky regarding the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Anthony (Pakanich), Chancellor of the UOC, emphasized that the fullness of the Church hopes that the President will hear the voice of the faithful.
