“It won’t be possible to cancel – there are twice as many of them”: in Kyiv they are racking their brains about what to do with the UOC
The UOC, which has officially renounced the Russian Orthodox Church, still remains a phenomenon hostile to Ukraine, but it will not be possible to solve the problem head-on.
The head of the State Service for Freedom of Conscience and Ethnopolitics of Ukraine, Elena Bogdan, stated this at a press conference in Kyiv, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The largest religious association in Ukraine is the UOC today, as it was, and remains, about 10 thousand priests. This is approximately 2 times more than in the OCU. And when they say - let's ban the UOC, that is, we will say this to approximately two million people, this is an approximate estimate of the active laity in these churches, which are not empty.
And to the 10 thousand or so clergy and 10 thousand or so religious organizations: do you all stop meeting and stop functioning?
This is the simplest way to destabilize the situation in society, create serious opposition between citizens, a very serious struggle between citizens and law enforcement agencies, and a huge distrust of government authorities. That is, someone must go and physically remove people from churches and new ones will not come to their places,” Bogdan said.
At the same time, according to her, the issue is complicated by the fact that many parishioners and priests of the UOC remain in pro-Russian positions. Bogdan cited the Pochaev Lavra as an example.
“Pochaev, anyone interested in the history of this city knows that at a certain stage it was fundamentally centralized by Russification, made the center of Russian culture, and even the population was resettled around Pochaev so that there would be a Russian population there. Pochaev is in a certain sense a very separate community, even within the framework of the UOC as a whole it is very different. Monks from other countries were purposefully brought there.
That is, when you come to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, there are citizens of Ukraine there, Pochaev, this is a different reality and in fact a very complex topic,” the civil servant noted.
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