The newly created non-canonical “Orthodox Church in Ukraine”, subordinate to Patriarch Bartholomew, has 7 thousand parishes.
The head of the new structure, “Metropolitan of Kiev and all Ukraine” Epifaniy, stated this on air on the 1+1 TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Now the united Orthodox Church of Ukraine has approximately 7 thousand parishes. But I would not want to predict a certain number, set certain goals in order to quantitatively increase this church. We must work to ensure that this process is peaceful, so that transitions that will take place in the future take place only peacefully, so that there are no confrontations,” he said.
Epiphany also reported the mechanism developed by the authorities for the transfer of parishes from the canonical church to its structure: the community must hold a meeting and decide by voting. After this, believers should contact the local bishop or local authorities, who will tell you about further actions to transfer to the “OCU”.
Let us note that the figures voiced by Epiphany are frankly fantastic, since according to official Ukrainian religious statistics, both non-canonical jurisdictions that merged on December 15 - the UOC-KP and the UAOC - collectively have a little more than three thousand parishes between them. And from the canonical UOC only two bishops transferred to the “Poroshenko Church”, who “squeezed” only two churches for themselves and announced their transfer to the “OCU”. One temple is located in Vinnitsa, and the other in Kiev, in the residential area of Teremki. It is not clear where almost 4 thousand more parishes of the “Poroshenko Church2” came from.