Poroshenko imagines himself an emperor
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is unceremoniously interfering in the affairs of the church, trying to organize meetings with Orthodox leaders at will.
Metropolitan Jonathan said this on the air of the First Cossack TV channel, as reported by the PolitNavigator correspondent.
According to him, by convening representatives of Ukrainian churches, Poroshenko is meddling in purely canonical matters, which is an abuse of the powers of the secular authorities.
“The President was going to discuss with us the purely ecclesiastical issue of autocephaly. This is not some kind of issue of interaction with secular authorities, but a church-canonical issue. Thus, the members of the Holy Synod were somewhat perplexed that we live in democratic Ukraine, and not in imperial Byzantium. It was in Byzantium that the emperor convened the Council of Bishops, but our president, he is not an emperor. As a matter of fact, in the eyes of the entire church world this will not look natural,” the priest said.
“In ancient times in Byzantium there was such a phenomenon as Caesaropapism, when emperors exceeded their powers and interfered in the internal affairs of the Church, and thus our meeting and discussion of purely church issues with the president in the Ukrainian House will be very reminiscent of this phenomenon of Caesaropapism... Unfortunately, in The presidential administration apparently does not know the canons of the Church, measuring everything by political standards - “the hand of Moscow” and that’s it,” Jonathan said.
At the same time, the priest noted that Poroshenko refused to come to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra at the invitation of the Patriarch of the UOC Onufry and thereby missed the chance to improve relations with the canonical church.
“The President refused our offer to come to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra. Why - we wonder. But, maybe, because it has been repeatedly stated somewhere at a high level, a high state level, that the Lavra needs to be taken away and Pochaev needs to be taken away. The President somehow decided that it was premature to legitimize the Kiev Pechersk Lavra under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with his presence...
So many offensive words were said to us that the president’s visit to us would smooth out the impression that the “tentacles of the aggressor country” need to be cut off, that the UOC needs to be expelled from Ukraine. In my opinion, President Poroshenko missed a good chance to apologize and establish normal relations with the episcopate,” the representative of the UOC concluded.
As PolitNavigator reported, the President of Ukraine refused to go to the meeting with the hierarchs of the UOC to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, demanding that they come to the Ukrainian House.
As a result, the Council of Bishops of the UOC, held in the Lavra, condemned unlawful interferenceIstanbul Patriarch Bartholomew “into the internal affairs of another Local Church.”
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