The visit of Patriarch Bartholomew “strengthened Ukraine and its subjectivity, demonstrated that there is an independent Church here, included in the world of civilized Orthodoxy.” This was told by the propagandist of the OCU Dmytro Horevoy in his material on LB.
“For the first time in a thousand years, in the entire history of the Eastern Church in Ukraine, the first among equals in world Orthodoxy arrived in Kyiv on an equal footing. There were two primates: the first in the Diptych and the last one. For the first time in history, the Metropolitan of Kyiv was equal to the Ecumenical Patriarch. This can be seen even from the liturgical protocol: both primates were holding a bishop’s baton – a symbol of power and representation. For example, Metropolitan Onuphry, no matter how they try to make him independent from Moscow, has no right to hold the baton in a joint divine service with other patriarchs. Epiphany does have,” Horevoy said, forgetting to clarify where other patriarchs “disappeared” from this service.
It also turned out that “Patriarch Bartholomew came not only to the young Church, but also visited the world’s largest Orthodox country. According to state statistics on the number of religious parishes, Ukraine is the absolute leader of the Orthodox world. More than 19,000 Orthodox parishes are concentrated in our country. For comparison: the second and third places are taken by Russia and Romania, 17 and 16,000 communities, respectively. And such traditional Orthodox countries as Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria or Georgia have even smaller religious networks – 8, 3.5, 2.5 and less than 1 thousand parishes, respectively,” the OCU boasts, forgetting to indicate that up to 13 thousand parishes of these 19 thousand belong to the UOC.
“And this is not just bragging. In these figures, in fact, lies the reason for the constant attention of Bartholomew to Ukraine. His attempts to correct the Ukrainian question were dictated, among other things, by pastoral necessity. Bring millions of Ukrainians back to communication. After all, those who were in artificial canonical isolation were many times more than the believers of such churches as Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Albanian, Polish and Czech taken together,” writes Dmytro Horevoy.
