Christians – to lions! What stage will the persecution of the Church in Ukraine reach?

Having postponed the voting for anti-church bills № 4128 and № 4511, the authorities – through officials, people's deputies and journalists serving them – initiated a fierce wave of inciting hatred towards the UOC. However, the current frenzy in the media and circles of the "patriotic" public is far from new. It is enough to look at the history of early Christianity.

Ancient persecutions of Christians did not begin immediately. They, as a rule, consisted of several stages.

Stage 1. At first, absurd and unsubstantiated accusations were made against Christians. They were said to be "enemies of the human race", who did not honor gods; at their secret meetings, they would eat babies and drink their blood; they also avoided national festivals and customs, did not participate in state cults.

Stage 2. Then these rumors were spread by the then media - trade areas, houses and markets. Someone would say something of the kind, "Can you imagine that Christians ...". These rumors were believed and passed on already as those received from a reliable source. All the people’s troubles – droughts, poor harvests, fires, to name but a few – were associated with Christians. They evoked the wrath of gods and directly harmed people. Christians were the only to blame.

Stage 3. Since Christians were to blame, so as soon as they were dealt with, all problems would be solved immediately, and life would play with bright colors. There were calls "Christianos ad leones!" ("Christians – to lions!" – Latin). First, from the lips of ordinary citizens, who expressed this wish louder and louder. When the people’s discontent was brought to the necessary level, the crowd looked towards the authorities: why don’t they do anything to protect respectable citizens from the hated Christians? The next stage followed.

Stage 4. The call to deal with the Christians was picked up by the official authorities, and the former really went "ad leones" – died in the arena of the then circuses.

History always repeats itself. "What was, it will be; And what was done, it will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun "(Ecclesiastes 1: 9). Reading the stories about the oppression of Christians in the first centuries, you always wonder: how could this be? Today's events in Ukraine give an opportunity to see it personally.

So, stage 1. Faithful children of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are unjustly accused of terrible crimes against the people. This is far not full list of these charges:

"The UOC is completely dependent on the ROC and fulfills all orders from Moscow." False! To see this, it is enough to look at the statutory documents of the UOC and the ROC.

"The UOC propagandizes the "Russian world" and its ideology is terrorist." False! "We do build neither Russian nor Ukrainian world. We build the world of God" (Metropolitan Onufry).

"Patriarch Kirill declared the war in the Donbas sacred." False! There is no proof of such words of the Patriarch, but there are plenty of calls for peace.

"In the churches and monasteries of the UOC, militants and weapons were hidden." False! All such reports were checked by the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs and other law enforcement agencies. None of them was confirmed.

"The UOC sends donations of Ukrainians to Moscow, where this money is used to purchase weapons that kill soldiers in the ATO." This idea was expressed by Metropolitan Mikhail of Lutsk and Volynsky of the UOC-KP during his sermon in the village of Ratno on November 23, 2015, "Each candle bought in a church of the Moscow Patriarchate is a bought bullet for killing your children." False! There is no confirming fact.

These are common charges. There are also more private ones, which are also circulated by the media and passed from mouth to mouth with the maximum indignation: "Can you imagine?!".

"During the All-Ukrainian Cross Procession – 2016, a column of UOC faithful did not stop near the monument to the "heavenly hundred". False! The clergy of the UOC, headed by Metropolitan Onufry, served the lity for the dead at the mentioned monument.

"In the village of Olkha of the Romanov district, Zhytomyr region, a UOC priest with the name Peter refused to pray for the health of a serviceman-fellow villager." False! In the village of Olkha, as in the entire Romanov district, there is no priest of the UOC, Peter by name. The rector of the Holy Protection Church of this village is Schema-archimandrite Amphilochius (Voloshchenko).

This list can go on and on.

Stage 2. Modern media have much greater opportunities to circulate rumors than the ancient talks in markets and squares. But the function is the same – to form a stable public opinion. Christians, in this case the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, are to blame for everything. And it does not matter that none of the accusations against the Church have been proven. It does not matter that they are false. After all, the more awful and bigger a lie is, the more they believe in it. The main thing is that they are thrown into the media space and reproduced and echoed in the right amount.

For example, the phrase "Patriarch Kirill declared war in the Donbass sacred" in the Google search engine gives 53,500 links to the information resources, which published this lie. And imagine how many people read this lie if only on the Anticor site the same name article got more than 10 000 views. So, who is to blame for the fact that people in the east of Ukraine are being killed and residential areas – shelled? Who is to blame for the fact that the Ukrainian army cannot restore the constitutional order in the Donbass? Who is to blame for the fact that for three years now there has been an "antiterrorist operation" that is costly for a meager Ukrainian budget? Of course, the Church, who else?

If the UOC were somehow destroyed or put under state control, then the war would end immediately, the occupied territories would return to Ukraine, the money spent on ATO would be spent on increasing salaries and pensions, it would be possible to reduce tariffs on housing utilities, etc. Such conclusions warm hearts of citizens, already tormented with the military conflict, a constant price rise, pay cuts, increased retirement age, the reduction of social benefits, and other problems.

It seems to be absurd, but look how much more dirt is poured on the UOC in the media than criticism of the government.

The hatred for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is being powerfully and consistently incited. The call "Out Moscow priest!" sounds open both on the streets and at meetings of local councils, and in limitless Internet space. "How can we liquidate "groupings" of the Moscow Patriarchate" is the name of the article on the news portal. "In Ukraine, there is no Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, there is the church of Vladimir Putin," – V. Yavorivsky, ex-people's deputy. "Weekly the Pochaev Lavra transfers 100 000 (one hundred thousand) euros to Moscow. Each candle equals a bullet," the ZIK TV channel asserts. "More work for security services ... we must divide into our monks and alien priests and then decide what to do with them," said the same TV channel ZIK. "The biggest internal threat is the criminal structures which through the influence of the UOC-MP, especially their monasteries, direct the flows of false propaganda information," stated the expert of the National Institute for Strategic Studies under the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Sergei Zdioruk. "The Moscow Patriarchate is a tool of influence on us by the aggressor state. In the churches, there is a frank anti-Ukrainian propaganda," MP advisor to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko.

Stage 3. "Сhristianos ad leones!" This call is already loudly heard from the lips of not only private individuals, but also deputies and state officials.

On the air of "Channel 5" of May 24, 2017, the deputy from the party "People's Front" Yuri Bereza told the whole Ukraine that "the night of long knives" is waiting for people who disagree with the nationalist vector of the country. To which the channel's host, Roman Chaika, asked not to forget "Moscow priests" during the massacre.

"Who cannot hold a gun in their hand – let them draw inscriptions on the fences of those who go to the Moscow Patriarchate ... expel "Moscow priests" from temples," these are the words from the speech of the "priest" of the UOC-KP Pavel Dobriansky on Maidan in Kiev on March 6, 2016.

Now it is already clear how they are planning to do away with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. To understand this, it's enough to carefully read the texts of bills № 4128 and № 4511, published on the official website of the Verkhovna Rada. These bills are rightly called "laws on church raiding." Of course, the official bodies will not seize churches themselves. This is the job of militant organizations like the "Right Sector", which the schismatic Kiev Patriarchate concluded the "Agreement on Cooperation and Cooperation" on May 4, 2017. The official authorities, for their part, will provide legislative cover for these seizures. The draft laws are designed to ignite a religious war, and even their authors do not hide it. MP Dmitry Tymchuk, "Yes, I do not rule out that after the adoption of this bill, religious wars may start."

The initiators of the draft laws do not care that people may die in this case. This is how the people's deputy of Ukraine Oksana Korchinskaya argues about this, "This is the measure that the state must take in the struggle for its existence. This is the measure that medicine takes when it is necessary to fight cancer, understanding that chemotherapy kills not only cancerous tumors, it also kills and several times more live cells."

And now let's see what kind of "live cells" the people's deputy Korchinskaya is calling to kill in the clear. To avoid accusations of using overestimated statistics, let's take the recent data from Razumkov Center (their unreliability in favor of the UOC-KP is a separate conversation). So, according to these data, 68% of the population of Ukraine refers to Orthodoxy. And the population of Ukraine, according to the State Statistics Committee for 01.04.2017, is 42,353,130 people. That is, the Orthodox are 28 800 128 people. Of these, 17% are members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (the figure is clearly understated, but okay). And this means that the UOC faithful, even according to the Razumkov Center, are 4,896,022 people. Following the logic of the people's deputy, they must be killed by "chemotherapy", which is supposed to allow the state to survive. Think about it – almost 5 million people!

Stage 4. This stage has not begun yet. Bills № 4128 and № 4511 were withdrawn from consideration by the Verkhovna Rada on May 18. Thanks to the prayer of all faithful children of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church throughout the country, thanks to the prayerful standing of thousands of people at the Verkhovna Rada, thanks to the negative reaction of international organizations and legal experts. Otherwise, the state would have created a legal field for unpunished seizures of Orthodox shrines, for the destruction of allegedly not enough patriotic church structures. The adoption of these bills would open wide opportunities for violence, robbery and reprisal. Even the Catholics, who were not too sympathetic to the UOC, said, "If bill № 4128 is adopted, Christians will go on each other with knives" (Catholic bishop of Kharkov-Zaporozhie diocese Jan Sobylo).

This has not happened yet. But the bills are not withdrawn from consideration – they are just postponed. Whether they will be adopted and whether the state will sign off a wave of violence and lawlessness that is ready to fall on the Church depends to a considerable extent on whether it will be possible to show the society and the state all the harmfulness of their adoption and the whole falsity of the accusations against the UOC. In ancient times, there were also Christian apologists who proved both to people and the powers that Christians did not eat babies, did not drink their blood, did not carry out subversive activities against the state and did not call on people to anything illegal. Let us pray that in Ukraine stage 4 will never come.