Three years later: Fresh attempts to recarve the church landscape

Three years ago, on April 1, 2023, the “weapons theologian” Yura Chernomorets could barely contain his delight when the Ministry of Culture unilaterally tore up its lease agreement with the UOC for the use of the Lower Lavra premises, forcing all UOC institutions – above all the Metropolia and the Kyiv Theological Academy and Seminary – out of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. Chernomorets branded the Ukrainian Orthodox Church “the abomination of lawlessness” and went on to deliver a prophecy: since the UOC’s institutions were leaving the Lavra – since, in his words, “the abomination of lawlessness is being removed from the holy place” – Ukraine would already win the war against Russia that very same year, in 2023.

In the comments, Yura’s friends were already dreaming up the next chapter: that in place of the Kyiv Academy and Seminary, the Lower Lavra would soon house a European-style OCU theological university – no worse than those of Athens or Thessaloniki – built on the vaporous foundations of Fr. Heorhiy Kovalenko’s “Open Orthodox University.” All that was needed, apparently, was to give Fr. Heorhiy a little support.

How magnificently those dreams have come true – in the Lavra’s spiritual and educational life after the expulsion of the UOC and the handover to the OCU – we can all see for ourselves.

And now, today, the scandal-prone MP Ihor Huz, well known for his visceral hostility toward the UOC, stood up at a session of the Volyn Regional Council and called “scumbags” those officials who had dared, back in 2020, to sign long-term lease agreements with UOC monasteries in Volyn. Huz is demanding that all such leases be torn up and that the UOC in Volyn be stripped altogether of every church and monastic building. In his view, the SBU and the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience should also be enlisted for the job.

Speaking specifically about the St. Nicholas Miletsky Monastery – which was painstakingly revived over the course of thirty years by UOC monks, and whose lease expired on January 1, with officials now apparently too hesitant to renew it – Huz urged deputies not to drag their feet over transferring the monastery to the OCU. According to the MP, once the UOC monks are evicted and the monastery is handed over to the OCU, it will suddenly blossom into “the cradle of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in Polissia,” a “center of pilgrimage,” a “spiritual center of the OCU.”

Shall we believe him?