UPTs THINKS PATRIARCH BARTHOLOMEW IS VICTIM OF PROVOCATION IN "UKRAINIAN QUESTION"
Interfax-Religiia, 5 September 2018
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UPTs) thinks that the report by Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew at the Synaxis, where he declared the right to decide the Ukrainian ecclesiastical question and rejected the right of the Russian Orthodox Church (RPTs) to do this was the result of the work of provocateurs.
"Recently we have received much provocational reports about the meeting of the patriarchs in Istanbul and I suppose that the latest is also among them. It is difficult to believe that this illiterate (from all points of view, both canonical, historical, and even literary) text could have been made by a self-respecting church hierarch," the head of the press service of the UPTs, Vasily Anisimov, said in an interview with Interfax-Religiia on Wednesday.
He said that the authors of this provocation do not know that in the 14th century, the see of the metropolitans of Kiev was moved to Moscow, not from Kiev, but from Vladimir, to which it had been moved after the total destruction of Kiev by Khan Batu.
"Over the course of centuries, Moscow, as the capital of the only completely independent Orthodox state, was the site of pilgrimage by persons who were suffering from the heterodox yoke of eastern patriarchs, to which they had gone for material support and gathering alms. And they always were received. Two patriarchs of Constantinople even died along the road during these journeys, on the territory of current-day Ukraine," V. Anisimov explained.
He recalled that Constantinople always urged both the Russian tsardom and the Russian empire to carry out the mission of defenders of the faith and liberators of Orthodox peoples and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev maintained that it was for this that endless, bloody Russo-Turkish wars were conducted, which brought liberty and independence to Balkan nations from the centuries-long Ottoman yoke.
"The Church of Christ, the Orthodox Church, was reborn everywhere. And this liberty was paid for by the lives of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, the ancestors of modern-day citizens of Russia, Ukraine, Belorusia and Moldavia," V. Anisimov said.
In his opinion, attempts by Constantinople to revise the history after 700 years seem strange. "What, it may be asked, were you silent about for centuries, but now have perceived? Isn't this stupid? Are we supposed to reconsider at the same time the results of the battle of Thermopylae? Why should the whole Orthodox church be exposed to ridicule?" the UPTs spokesman asked.
V. Anisimov also answered Patriarch Bartholomew's words to the effect that supposedly there are no historical documents that completely surrendered Kiev to Moscow in church relations except for the letter of Patriarch Dionysius IV written "as a result of intense political pressure." In this letter, as Patriarch Bartholomew noted in his report, Moscow was only granted the right to appoint the metropolitan of Kiev on the condition that each metropolitan of Kiev will commemorate the name of the ecumenical patriarch as his spiritual leader.
"The provocateurs do not know that there was not 'one letter,' but a whole heap of tomos of the Constantinople and Jerusalem patriarchs to believers of the Kiev metropolitanate, the Moscow patriarch, Muscovite tsars, Hetman Samoilovich, and others; all these documents sanctioned the joining of the Kiev metropolitanate to the Russian Orthodox Church. The tomos from Constantinople was signed not only by the patriarch but by the entire council of metropolitans of the Constantinople church. These charters were published back in the 19th century. Where is there even a word about the 'preservation of the authority of Constantinople'?" V. Anisimov asked.
He also reminded Patriarch Bartholomew about the results of the rule of the church of Constantinople in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.
"By the beginning of the 18th century, in all of right-bank Ukraine and Belorussia there remained only one Orthodox see, in Mogilev of Belorussia, and the Kiev metropolitanate had been practically 'purged' by the authorities and converted to the Unia. For ten years the election of the metropolitan of Kiev was not permitted and the clergy were persecuted as Turkish spies. The Orthodox church was betrayed by the elite, landowners, and troops and there was nobody to protect it except the Zaporozhe cossacks," V. Anisimov said, recalling that it was the cossacks who were the initiators of the reunification of the Kiev metropolitanate with the Russian Orthodox Church.
And nobody doubted the canonicity of this act for more than 200 years. It was regarded as a great blessing, the representative of the UPTs noted, recalling that from that time persecutions ceased and the flowering of Orthodoxy in the lands of modern-day Ukraine began. Thousands of churches and hundreds of monasteries were built and Kiev was transformed from a provincial military town with a population of 10,000 in the 18th century into a European capital by the end of the 19th.
"Nobody in Constantinople stood up for authority over the desolate Kiev metropolitanate, but when the metropolitanate was revived by the efforts of whole generations, they hungered for it. Is this worthy?" V. Anisimov summed up. (tr. by PDS, posted 6 September 2018)
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