“Who, if not Ukraine, should defend the position of the Mother Church,” says the hierarch of the OCU, “Metropolitan” of Lviv and Sokal Dimitriy Rudyuk, reports Religious Pravda.

“What are the main theological and canonical ideas or messages of Patriarch Bartholomew, over which we would need to deeply reflect? The first is the role of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in establishing the autocephaly of the churches of Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Albania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, formed from the canonical-jurisdictional body of the Constantinople Mother Church. The second is Universal Orthodoxy – a combination of incongruous in the spirit of rapprochement in differences. The third is the transmission once again of the profound canonical and theological assessment of the annexation by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Kiev Metropolis in 1686, which was torn off from the same body of the Constantinople Mother Church. The fourth is an understanding of the essence of autocephaly as such, to which the Church of Constantinople has an exclusive right and the goal of providing it to the mature Local Church. And finally – the role of the primacy in honor of the Ecumenical Patriarch, which consists in sacrificial service, and not in the bombast of the authorities and the promotion of various poisonous imperial ideologies, as suggested by the neighboring Patriarchate,” Rudyuk noted.

He stressed that “Ukraine must defend the position of the Mother Church, which is receiving a flurry of false accusations from Moscow.”