Greetings from the Serbian Patriarch Porfirije, read out by Bishop Anthony of Moravic to the participants of the International Conference “Unity of the Church: Theological, Canonical and Historical Dimensions”, which began in Kyiv on November 11, 2021:
“The Lord has judged us to live in an era of cooling love (Matthew 24:12) and the impoverishment of the sense of conciliarity in the Orthodox world. The consequences of this crisis were the hardships that befell the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
The ordeals that have befallen the Orthodox people of Ukraine are not easy. According to the law of church life, unity and conciliarity, we empathize with our brothers. When in the recent past Serbian churches turned into ruins and thousands of Serbs became refugees, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was spiritually with us, and we always felt the prayerful support of Kyiv.
Support for schismatics, threats and violence, the seizure of Orthodox churches and the adoption of discriminatory laws against canonical Orthodoxy cannot be justified by any state or national considerations, for all this is an open war against Christ the Savior, as well as against His One, Holy, Catholic and the Apostolic Church.
The Church of St. Sava recognized and recognizes only one canonical Church in Ukraine – the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the omophorion of Your Beatitude.”
As previously reported, on this day, the UOC organizes an International Scientific and Practical Conference on the topic: “Unity of the Church: theological, canonical and historical dimensions.”
The scientific forum is dedicated to the theological and canonical comprehension of the principle of the conciliarity of the Church and the issue of primacy among the Local Orthodox Churches.
In addition to theologians and scholars from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the conference is attended by representatives of seven Local Orthodox Churches: Antioch, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Polish, Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and the Orthodox Church in America.
