Chaplin did not support the idea of getting ahead of Bartholomew with the issuance of the tomos of the UOC
Autocephaly for the Ukrainian Church is an “absurdity” that some “traitors” are trying to push through.
About this during the TV show “Sha!” said a conservative religious public figure, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Answering the question whether the Russian Orthodox Church should have given the tomos to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, released it, given it autocephaly and thus maintained fraternal relations, Chaplin spoke about the unity of these churches.
“There is this idea, it is quite often voiced by Father Andrei Kuraev, Sergei Cherapen, and some other people. It is partly attributed to one of the famous hierarchs. Moreover, I do not believe that this attribution really has anything to do with reality. Here’s the thing: we are one Rus' and one Church. Kyiv is the same center of our church as Moscow. Yes, there is a certain number of people, by the way, not the majority among active believers, who believe that a Ukrainian church should appear, independent of Moscow, that Moscow is not Rus', that it is almost some kind of Mongol-Tatar horde. But if you look at a map of historical Russian cities in a historical museum, then please: here it is Kyiv, here it is Smolensk, here it is Novgorod, here it is Pskov. On some of these maps there is no Moscow, because instead there were forests and some small village. But an attempt to separate the Ukrainian church from the church that we have here (in Russia – author’s note) is complete absurdity,” the archpriest noted.
Chaplin also called the separation of the Ukrainian church an artificial event that had no historical basis.
“You see, an absolutely old historical reality, which has nothing to do with the borders of modern Ukraine, was pulled out of storage, pulled onto a modern programmer and declared a historically determined decision.
For some reason, they were silent for three hundred years, and now they have decided to tear away this metropolis in completely different borders, far from our religion. All this is a very artificial thing, both historically and modernly. Now in many dioceses of the Ukrainian Church, including west of Kyiv, people are gathering, clergy are gathering and saying that they do not want to go to this Poroshenko autocephaly and remain faithful to the canonical church, they do not want church enmity with Moscow. And this is very sincere... You know, there are, including in our canonical Ukrainian church, some traitors who are trying, for various, I believe, purposes, to bargain for a place in this new hypothetical autocephaly,” said Vsevolod Chaplin.
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