The United States officially supported Poroshenko’s idea of church autocephaly
Washington supports granting autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
This is stated in a statement by State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, published on the State Department website.
“The United States respects the ability of Ukrainian religious leaders and believers to follow the course of autocephaly in accordance with their convictions,” the report says. “We respect the Ecumenical Patriarch as the voice of religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue.”
Nauert added that the United States supports “Ukraine and its territorial integrity.” “We also support Ukraine as it determines its own path, makes its own decisions and associations, free from external interference,” the statement said.
In Ukraine there is currently one canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which is a self-governing church within the Moscow Patriarchate. There are also two church structures in the country that are not recognized by world Orthodoxy - the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Since 1991, the authorities have made repeated attempts to create a local Orthodox Church, independent of the Moscow Patriarchate.
On September 7, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, “in preparation for the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” appointed its exarchs in Kyiv. The Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church called on Patriarch Bartholomew not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and on his exarchs to leave Ukraine. In response, the government-controlled snitch resource “Peacemaker” included the Primate of the UOC, Metropolitan Onuphry, in its database of “enemies of Ukraine.”
In turn, the head of the unrecognized UOC-KP Filaret visited the United States and enlisted the support of the former vice-president of this country, Joe Biden, whom he awarded with the order of his church structure.
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