Primate of the Polish Church: Epifaniy is a layman, he needs to be ordained

The Primate of the Polish Church, Metropolitan Sawa, again declared the OCU hierarchs lack canonicity. He believes that after suspensions of the Russian Orthodox Church, Filaret performed his “consecrations” being a layman, respectively, Dumenko and other “hierarchs” of the OCU are in the same status. The Primate stated this in an interview with Polityka.

“Filaret was defrocked and had no right to perform further ordinations. We mean the non-canonical ordination of Epifaniy, the head of this new Ukrainian church, says the Polish Primate. “Epifaniy was ‘ordained’ by the former Metropolitan Filaret, who was deprived of his episcopal consecration, which means he is formally a layman.”

Metropolitan Sawa emphasized that the Polish Church does not recognize Filaret's "ordinations" and recalled that Patriarch Bartholomew held the same position not so long ago.

“For 22 years, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople would recognize the decision of the Moscow Patriarchate to defrock Metropolitan Filaret and depose him to the status of a layman as a schismatic of the Church. But various forces intervened: someone tried to convince Patriarch Bartholomew to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian Church under the leadership of Epifaniy.”

The Polish Primate noted that “all Orthodox Churches, including ours, recognize that Filaret was banned from the priesthood and has no right to confer it on others.”

According to the Metropolitan, there is only one solution for Dumenko – the canonical ordination. Only in this case it will be possible to talk about the legal status of the OCU hierarchy: "Then it can be part of the Ukrainian clergy."

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that Metropolitan Sawa called Dumenko a "secular person" who "suffered great harm when he was appointed metropolitan." Later, Dumenko stated that the OCU did not agree to re-ordination.