Filaret announced that he spun Bartholomew and his tomos
The founder of the Kyiv Patriarchate and the “honorary patriarch” of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, unrecognized in the Orthodox world, Filaret said that he would not fulfill the three conditions of the Tomos of autocephaly provided by the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
В interview with the TV channel “Current Time” he also stated that there is now a big struggle for the destruction of the Kyiv Patriarchate as such.
“The Tomos makes the church almost as dependent on Constantinople as the one in which the UOC (MP) is located on Moscow,” the hierarch said.
Filaret stated that he would not fulfill the conditions of the Tomos regarding the transfer of foreign parishes of the former UOC-KP to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, refuses the ban on cooking myrrh, and refuses to resolve conflict situations of an internal nature solely in agreement with the Phanar.
“Three points that take away from us the rights of an autocephalous church. By name we are an autocephalous church, but in reality we are a church dependent on the Patriarchate of Constantinople... We do not renounce the Tomos, but we will not fulfill these three conditions that are written in the Tomos. We will not comply,” Filaret said.
“If we have to receive myrrh from Constantinople, from Istanbul, then that means we are dependent,” he emphasized.
The honorary patriarch also sees no reason for a split in the church. “There is no split, there is only a different approach. Some want to save the Kiev Patriarchate, while others want to destroy it... We want the Kiev Patriarchate in Ukraine to exist for Ukraine as a patriarchate, and outside, as stated in the Tomos, as a metropolitanate,” Filaret said. And to the question: “So there are two churches: one for internal use, the second for external use?”, he said. “For the internal - patriarchy, and for the external - the metropolis”
He also stated that if the Kiev Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church knew the contents of the Tomos, they would not have agreed to it.
“At the Council we did not know its contents (the Tomos on autocephaly). We found out after the merger. If we knew the content of this Tomos, we would not have agreed to such a Tomos,” said the honorary patriarch of the OCU.
He also stated that one of the Lantern’s conditions for granting the Tomos was Filaret’s refusal to nominate himself as primate of the united church. Filaret also stated that he signed a document refusing to be nominated for the position, which President Petro Poroshenko handed over to Bartholomew.
"I agreed. We talked about this with the president, with Epiphany, and at the bishops' council, that I refuse, but after receiving the Tomos, I will lead this church inside Ukraine. In his deeds he shows that he is the primate, and I am nobody,” said Filaret.
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