Archbishop Ihor Isichenko of UAOC Called Existence of Pro-Ukrainian Group in UOC-MP Abstraction

Archbishop Ihor (Isichenko) of Kharkiv and Poltava of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church stated on 23 February that the struggle of the patriotic and pro-Moscow group within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) is just an abstraction in which everyone has believed.

Archbishop Ihor (Isichenko) of Kharkiv and Poltava of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, a professor at V. Karamzin Kharkiv National University, stated on February 23, as part of Iryna Farion's project “From the Book to the Hoal” that the struggle of the patriotic and pro-Moscow group within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) is just an abstraction in which everyone has believed. So reported ZIK.

According to him, one should carefully analyze the information campaigns with regard to the Moscow Patriarchate. “Every time when one of our priests, Father Ihor Lytvyn from Poltava, reads about the struggle between the patriotic and pro-Moscow parties within the Moscow Patriarchate, he says: Show me at least one patriotic priest of the Moscow patriarchate? Why do they always talk about some patriotic sector there and I never met a single such priest in my life?” said the archbishop.

In his opinion, it is just an abstraction in which everyone has believed. “Obviously, similarly to those Cossacks who struggled for the position of a dominant stratum in the new state, a kind of nobility, and used such pseudo religious demagogy to shield their aspirations, today it is also convenient to shield the real intrigues and struggle with material values or political phraseology. I think it is the same case,” said the archbishop.

The hierarch advised the faithful to pray that the Holy Spirit should descend on the participants of the Synods, priests of the Moscow Patriarchates. “In order for them to find solutions to the problems they have. And the problem is global and it has not arisen today. When was the Pochayiv Monastery a Ukrainian shrine during the almost 200 years since it was passed to the MP? As the late patriarch said, it is a White Guard stronghold in Volyn, which was cleverly designed by the Moscow czarism.

The archbishop also stated that the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine always existed as the Russian national church. “It is not noticeable in the west of Ukraine, but it is very noticeable here, in the east. And the fact that the Ukrainian image, which was successfully used under President Kravchuk, disappears is a problem of the Moscow Patriarchate. The truth becomes evident. The problem for the parishioners, priests and even bishops is that of the choice. They will either stay in that part or seek for ways to return to the canonical field of Orthodoxy,” noted the archbishop.