Primate of Canadian UOC Metropolitan Yuri retires

This is reported by the UOC-Canada website on Facebook.

Metropolitan Yuri served 33 years in the holy rank, including 21 years as a bishop and 11 years as the sixth Primate of the Church.

According to the religious scholar Andriy Yurash, the Charter of the UPCC stipulates that after the retirement of the head of the Church, the respective official duties of locum tenens until the next Council is convened will be performed by the senior hierarch, who is currently Bishop Hilarion (Rudnyk) of Edmonton and the Western Diocese.

Bishop Hilarion, who turned 49 this year, was born in Lviv, Ukraine. He studied at the Kyiv Theological Seminary and Academy. Over time, he continued his studies in Greece, where he mastered the Greek language perfectly, and at the University of Illinois. He was ordained a bishop in 2005 and has been a member of the UPCC episcopate since 2007.

He was one of the two Exarchs of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Ukraine during the negotiations on granting canonical autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

The election of a new head of the Church will take place, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter, next year (but not later than July), at the 24th Council of the UPCC.

"Metropolitan Yuriy not only led the UPCC judiciously and wisely for more than a decade but also made an irreplaceable and sacrificial contribution to maintaining negotiation and other contacts with the Church of Constantinople in recognizing the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church, which was implemented in the period 2015-2019. Metropolitan Yuriy has repeatedly visited Ukraine in person and with numerous public statements and concrete deeds inspired the Ukrainian community to believe in the rapid and inevitable realization and achievement of the aspirations that several generations of Ukrainians have lived by," Yurash notes.