Several days ago, the leader of the Rus Party, Denys Shevchuk, proposed to turn the Kyiv Cave Monastery into a "state within a state" after the example of the Vatican.
That is that Ukraine might grant to the Kyiv Metropolitanate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) the status of a separate state. The head of the Synodal Information and Educational Department of UOC-MP, Protopriest Heorhii Kovalenko, expressed his thoughts in this regard to the Voice of People.
According to him, in Ukraine and in the tradition of the Orthodox Church, generally, there is no practice of a church institution becoming a state.
"First of all, the Kyiv Cave Monastery is not an autonomous church unit. It is the main monastery of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and all Ukraine, is the holy archimandrite there. Secondly, the Vatican is not a monastery; it is a curia, the place where the government of the whole Catholic Church is centered. Whereas the Kyiv Cave Monastery is one of the monasteries. Yes, the most important one, yes, the most historically valuable, but still just one of the monasteries. It has no status outside the church. Therefore, it cannot, in principle, receive a status separate from the church. For it is part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In addition, the monastery is not the whole church. It is only part of it. A part of the church cannot become something separate. The monastery cannot be likened to Vatican as these two structures have different purposes and different statuses. From the viewpoint of the canons of Orthodoxy, separating the Kyiv Cave Monastery into a separate state is not worth discussing," said Protopriest Heorhii.