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Over 26,000 Ukrainians have signed a petition asking Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky to consider the transfer of the
Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the
Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
This is stated in the petition posted on the president’s website.
It was initiated by Oleksiy Kravchuk on April 15; the minimum required number of signatures is 25,000.
The summary of the petition says that the OCU is an autocephalous
Orthodox church in Ukraine that ranks fifteenth among the churches
mentioned during a Christian church service. The Church of
Constantinople considers the OCU the only canonical successor of the
Orthodox Church founded in Kyiv in 988 AD.
“It is quite true that the Orthodox shrine [Lavra] should be used by
the Orthodox denomination that is recognized by Orthodoxy as an
autocephalous Orthodox church in Ukraine. In turn, the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is not an autocephalous
Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” it says. “In addition, high-ranking members
of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate were
repeatedly caught making statements and actions directed against the
Ukrainian people.”
“Given the above, the use of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery by the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate should be stopped
by terminating the lease agreement and transferred to the Orthodox
Church of Ukraine (OCU),” the petition says.
Further, the document sets out a detailed chronology of
anti-Ukrainian, pro-Russian statements made by representatives of the
Moscow Patriarchate.
As was reported, the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery saw a coronavirus
outbreak after priests of the Moscow Patriarchate had repeatedly
violated the quarantine rules.
unian.info