Ukrainian “decommunizers” are putting pressure on the governor of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra with the zeal of the Bolsheviks
The abbot of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Pavel of Vyshgorod and Chernobyl, announced the pressure exerted on him and his brethren by the authorities, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“There are many questions about whether the government’s actions are legal. These actions are not legal, pressure is being put on me - both threats and calls - and on many others. I can’t name the reasons, I don’t know them,” he said at a briefing on Thursday.
The Metropolitan said that cases have been opened against him. “I am accused on the basis of religious misunderstandings that I have the wrong attitude towards Patriarch Bartholomew. But I have great respect for him as a patriarch,” said the governor of the Lavra.
The clergyman does not rule out increasing pressure on him and even searches. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are searches and even more violence,” he said. At the same time, the Metropolitan said that he could not answer the question of who opened the cases against him, since they are closed from the public.
Also, according to him, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine is inspecting the property that was transferred to the Lavra in Soviet times. “The Ministry of Culture checks, and does not describe, what the USSR transferred for long-term use in 1988,” he noted.
According to the famous Orthodox publicist, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the Kyiv authorities are using “classical methods of the early Bolsheviks” against the UOC.
“Inventory of property (from yesterday and in the Kiev Pechersk Lavra), meetings of “workers”, conversations in the Cheka (SBU), campaign in newspapers. This is usually followed by the confiscation of temples, and then prisons and camps. People working in the Ukrainian “state apparatus” know this technology very well. Some studied it in Soviet authorities, others in Soviet universities. So “tradition” is used wisely. They report from Kyiv that the “counters” even got to the relics. Well, the pure years of early Bolshevism,” he notes in his telegram channel “Orthodox Politics”.
The Kiev Pechersk Lavra is one of the first monasteries to be founded in the Old Russian state. Founded in 1051 under Yaroslav the Wise by monk Anthony.
Currently, the lower monastery is under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and the upper monastery is under the jurisdiction of the National Kiev-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Reserve.
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