Met. Feodosiy: There is a campaign to discriminate against UOC in Ukraine
The authorities ignore appeals of UOC believers to stop raider seizures of churches and their illegal transfers to the OCU by way of "black" registrars, the bishop said.
In Ukraine, an organized campaign of discrimination and libel against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and millions of its parishioners has been going on for several years, Metropolitan Feodosiy of Cherkasy and Kaniv said in an interview with 112ua.tv.
According to the bishop, this campaign involves not only the media and radical groups, but often also government bodies. “There is a systematic discriminatory and slanderous campaign against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, against millions of believers – targeting in the first line His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry, bishops, priests, monks and up to simple rural parishioners who do not want to betray their faith,” Vladyka Feodosiy said.
He said that now Ternopil, Lviv, Rivne, Sarny, Lutsk, Vinnytsia and Mogilev-Podilsky dioceses of the UOC are under attack, where churches are forcefully seized by OCU activists with the assistance of local authorities.
As an example, Vladyka Feodosiy cited the Vinnytsia region, where the “black” registrars of the regional state administration illegally re-register a number of parishes of the UOC in favor of the OCU. At the same time, the authorities turn a deaf ear to the protests of believers.
“The parishioners, together with the bishops and clergy of Vinnytsia, are massively protesting near the Vinnytsia RSA. But, unfortunately, in most cases today it is a ‘voice in the wilderness’,” the bishop noted.
Talking about the situation in his Cherkasy diocese, Metropolitan Feodosiy noted that the situation with the UOC here is calm thanks to the friendly relations with the regional state administration, as well as long-term friendship with the mayor of Cherkasy Anatoly Bondarenko.
At the same time, the bishop noted that despite the peace in his diocese, the clergy and believers of the Cherkasy region support their persecuted brothers and sisters in the western regions. “Speaking about pressure and hostility from government agencies, the media or radicals on believers in different regions of our country, we, the clergy and believers of the Cherkasy diocese, perceive this all as our own disaster,” Metropolitan Feodosiy said.
As the UOJ reported, 22 new temples of the UOC were built over a year to replace those seized by the OCU.
