Ukrainian State Office Threatens Lawsuits Against Orthodox Dioceses That Keep Ties With Russian Church

The national ethnopolicy office has demanded that dioceses of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church cut their ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. According to the source, the office requires that the dioceses resign from the Russian Orthodox Church and that their clergy stop taking part in its chartered bodies.

The source reports that if a diocese does not meet these requirements voluntarily, the office will take the matter back to court in a case seeking to halt the church’s activity. DESS president Viktor Yelenskyi made the statement at a meeting in Zaporizhzhia, according to the Ukrinform report cited in the source.

Yelenskyi said that the law on protecting the constitutional order of religious organizations calls for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its parishes, dioceses, schools and monasteries to withdraw from the Russian Orthodox Church. He said the state was not demanding that the church change its liturgical language, switch to another church calendar, or join another church. “The Ukrainian State neither requires the U.C. to change the language of worship from church to Ukrainian, nor to change the calendar from Julian to Novlian, nor to become part of another church, but to stop being part of a terrorist organization, which is essentially the result of the Russian Orthodox Church,” he stated.

The head of the service said that last year the office had appealed to a court in a case concerning the Kyiv metropolis of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Authorities are now examining the connections of certain dioceses with the Kyiv Metropolis and demanding that those dioceses be removed from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The source says the dioceses should also stop taking part in the chartered institutions of the Russian Church.

If religious organizations do not carry out these demands, the authorities will seek the closure of the relevant diocese, the source reports. Yelenskyi said the requirements for correcting the alleged violations had already been given to the dioceses of Zaporizhzhia, Boryspil and a Baltic diocese. He said a lawsuit had already been prepared against one diocese, and that a lawsuit would also be filed against the Zaporizhzhia diocese because it had not complied, but that the case would be withdrawn if the diocese left the Russian Orthodox Church (a condition the source reports in garbled form).

Source: Read the original report (translated from Ukrainian)