Revelations of Hilarion Alfeyev: UGCC lobbies unification to convert everyone to Unia
Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Volokalamsk, head of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, in an interview with the Greek news agency Romfea, touched upon a number of topics related to Ukraine, Religion in Ukraine reports, citing the DECR.
Regarding the current state of Ukraine, Metropolitan Hilarion traditionally described the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (the Moscow Patriarchate) as “the country's largest faith” (obviously, he means the number of registered communities), which “remains out of politics and does not support any of the parties to the conflict" in Donbas.
“It allows this Church to preserve the peacekeeping potential, she really unites Ukraine. But now in Ukraine, the canonical Church is being forcibly unified with the schism,” says Hilarion.
Moreover, according to him, “the attempt to create the so-called “Unified Local Church” in Ukraine is another threat. Both the supporters of this project and the representatives of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church begin to openly claim that the purpose of the forcible association of the Orthodox believers of Ukraine - is their further accession to the Greek-Catholic Union.”
Metropolitan Hilarion did not present any evidence of this. According to him, “the influence of the Greek Catholic Church on the situation of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine has a clandestine character.” For example, he found that among the deputies-initiators of the appeal of the Ukrainian parliament to Patriarch Bartholomew with a request to provide Ukrainian Orthodoxy with autocephaly “the majority ... are Greek Catholics.”
It is noteworthy that Orthodox adherents often blame Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of the same - hidden influence on the ROC by the “agent of the Vatican’s influence”, “Uniate Archbishop-crypto-Catholic implanted in the Orthodox Church of the MP.”
The Greek Catholics, on their part, have long sought Rome's recognition of the UGCC status of the Patriarchate in unity with the Roman Catholic Church.
As RISU has reported, an open discussion "Patriarch Iosyp Slipyy: be yourselves!" was held in Kyiv on February 9, 2018, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the birth of Patriarch Iosyp Slipyy. One of the main topics of this discussion was the Patriarchate of the UGCC.
Having analyzed the importance of the Patriarchate for the UGCC and listed the myths and accusations related to this status, and after expressing the views of the former UGCC heads on the need for the patriarchy, His Beatitude Svyatoslav summed up on February 9, 2018: “I think it is a great mission of our Church to witness to the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine, as well as to the Roman Apostolic See how our patriarchate promotes the unification of the Churches.”
