Blitzkrieg against the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine failed
The hopes of the Ukrainian authorities that Istanbul’s granting of a tomos of autocephaly to the schismatic OCU will lead to a massive outflow to this jurisdiction from the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate have not justified themselves; the number of main confessions in Ukraine does not change significantly, moreover, the number of believers of the UOC-MP is even growing.
Religious scholar Yuri Reshetnikov said this on air on the Newsone TV channel, the religious scholar correspondent for PolitNavigator reports.
“There were expectations that a tomos would be given, and a huge number of communities of the UOC (MP) would move to the OCU. That did not happen. If there were hopes in 2014 that all these political waves would lead to everyone saying “Get away from Moscow!” and go to the “Kiev Patriarchate”, then in 2018 it was not very serious to talk about this.
But there were such hopes. They were not justified. They didn’t have to justify themselves - over the past few years, those who are truly churchgoers have clearly defined where they are and why. They made their choice.
In general, stabilization has occurred. The UOC today remains the largest Church in the country, approximately twice as large as the OCU. What’s most interesting is that the Razumkov Center, which certainly cannot be accused of any special sympathy for the UOC, this year, through social research, testified that the number of believers of the UOC is growing,” said the religious scholar.
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