Epiphany admitted that transitions to them from the canonical UOC came to naught
The main reason for the almost complete cessation of parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church transferring to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which is subordinate to Constantinople and unrecognized in the Orthodox world, is “the division of the Ukrainian Church, which has lasted for centuries,” reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
This opinion was expressed by OCU priest Ivan Sidor in a comment to the Kyiv publication UNN.
“In the first months, the transition was active and I attribute this to the fact that we, in Ukraine, have parishes where communities are active, thinking, and if these people saw that there is a united church, there is a provided Tomos, a registered Kiev Metropolis of the Orthodox Church Ukraine, legally all the points have already been made, then this community turned to its priest about the transition. And it was precisely during these months that those communities where parishioners spoke out about this moved,” he said.
He confirmed that the number of churches that are transferring to the OCU has indeed decreased.
“We must understand that the Orthodox Church in Ukraine was divided for a very long time. We can talk about three centuries when the Kiev Metropolis was transferred illegally to the Moscow Patriarchate and we can definitely talk about the period of independent Ukraine since 1991, when we did not have a single church: there was the Kiev Patriarchate, the Moscow Patriarchate, the Autocephalous Church and decades of division are difficult to overcome in several months,” he says.
Let us recall that according to the OCU itself, as of May 15, only 520 of the 12 thousand parish churches and two cathedrals of the canonical UOC, which were “taken away” by defector metropolitans Simeon Shostatsky and Alexander Drabinko, were transferred to it. In many cases, these “transitions” were actually the forceful seizure of UOC churches by radicals supporting the OCU.
Epiphanius admitted that the number of transfers from the canonical UOC to them has ceased to exist.