A full transition to the New Julian church calendar may require a generational change. This was stated by the head of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience Viktor Yelensky during an online briefing, UNIAN reports.

When asked whether many parishes are not yet ready to switch to the New Julian church calendar, Yelensky replied that “all the transitions to the new calendar in the Greek, Bulgarian, and Romanian Churches were accompanied by such “painful schisms” and the appearance of so-called old calendar churches that the fullness of Orthodoxy does not recognize. but they do exist.

At the same time, in his opinion, the OCU “acted quite prudently” when they “allowed those church communities, monastic communities, and monasteries in general that are not yet ready to switch to the new calendar – not to do this.”

“They got some time to make this transition,” Yelensky added.

According to him, the leadership of the OCU “is quite calm about the fact that some monastic community or some parish has not yet switched to some other calendar.”

When asked how long it would take to finally make this transition, the head of the State Employment Service said that “The Church is an institution that relies on tradition, and tradition means a lot. For example, if people for 50-60 years perceived the Liturgy exclusively in Church Slavonic , then it is difficult for them to immediately switch to the Ukrainian language. And in some communities, at least one Liturgy per week remains in Church Slavonic.”

“This transition requires a certain time and some possible change of generations. According to my observations, the higher the church consciousness of people, the less ritual beliefs they have, and the more the gospel basis, the less painful and more dynamic and more desirable this transition is,” he stressed.