The Crimean Metropolitan told how the Russian Orthodox Church will deal with Ukrainian traitors to Orthodoxy
The clergy of the OCU who betrayed the Orthodox Church deserve forgiveness if they repent of their sins.
This opinion was expressed by Metropolitan Tikhon of Simferopol and Crimea on the air of Crimea 24, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The Lord commanded to forgive, and we are his disciples. And it is a fact of life, as well as a truth of history, that we are called to do this. All the apostles, without exception, saw not only good, like those people who received benefits from Russia, who were in this culture, and so on.
The apostles who saw the resurrection of the dead, who saw healing, the apostles who saw what an amazing man was in front of them, already suspected even in their faith that this was God incarnate for the sake of people, so reduced to a human image as soon as the trials came, I even with I would say boldly, they escaped, incomparable to the trials that our fellow citizens in Ukraine now had. Everyone ran away.
So what? Well, the people, well, ran away. Then they returned and repented, including the Apostle Peter. We need to approach this somehow more simply...
If a person stands angrily and, so to speak, says that he will be an enemy to the end, that’s a different question. Of course, we need to check, but these are all sorts of special stories,” the Metropolitan emphasized.
According to him, there are many examples in history when people deliberately committed deception and betrayal, but then publicly repented of their actions.
“This is a difficult story, and it has happened more than once in the history of the church. You can't condone betrayal, you can't condone treason. There are things that cannot be forgiven, and betrayal too, if people do not repent. And we have had such stories, starting from ancient church times, when some became martyrs, and some cheated, then came and cried.
Metropolitan Sergius of Stragorodsky went into schism, and then Patriarch Tikhon received him at the Donskoy Monastery. He was on his knees in front of the people, and the patriarch came up to him, cried, took him by the beard and said: oh, you, I certainly didn’t expect this from you. But I forgave.
Sometimes this is a terrible, but period of a person’s life, his formation. We see too much betrayal, then repentance. And this is in no way an apology for betrayal or a justification for it, no. But there are still people who have not changed,” Tikhon emphasized.
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