84 communities of the UOC-MP operate abroad

This information is presented in the report of the Deputy Head of the UOC-MP Affairs, Metropolitan of Borodyanka and Brovary, Anthony, for the year 2023, as reported by the Information and Educational Department of the UOC-MP.

The UOC-MP parishes and missions abroad operate in 15 countries in Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Hungary, France, Switzerland, and Sweden.

All these communities are part of the Western European Vicariate of the UOC-MP, which was established in March 2023.

It should be noted that to open its centers abroad. The UOC-MP must indicate its affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church.

This was stated in October of this year by Archimandrite Gavriil (Anisimov), the deputy superior of the Stavropegial men's monastery named after St. Paisius Velichkovsky, located in the temporarily occupied Crimea. He was one of the first to organize these parishes abroad.

"Last year, and it was my idea, I worked on opening Ukrainian churches abroad, but after some time, the leadership of the Department of External Church Relations of the UOC-MP took this work away from me. They simply use people for their own interests. I know that today, they are already opening parishes. For example, there are some in Milan and other Italian cities. But these are unofficial parishes," he noted.

"There are certain agreements with Protestants, Catholics, where they have inactive, abandoned churches; they allow our Church to serve there. An interesting detail is that without agreement with the local municipalities, we cannot serve in churches. But when I tried to negotiate, for example, in Perugia, I was told that they would consider my request, and then they said they couldn't help. Later, I realized that the ROC was obstructing me because the municipalities directly told me that there is the Constantinople Patriarchate, there is the ROC, but what Church do you have? Supposedly, there is no separate Church like the UOC-MP. And I had nothing to answer that question. Without the ROC's consent, we cannot serve in any church abroad as the UOC-MP," emphasized the archimandrite.