Due to the new law, about 3 thousand churches can be taken away from the UOC, - religious scholar

Oleksandr Sagan, a lobbyist for the OCU, head of the Department of Religious Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences, said that due to the scandalous bill No. 8371 adopted by the Verkhovna Rada, which aims to ban the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the UOC risks losing about three thousand churches, which are used by the Church as architectural monuments on a lease basis. Sagan said this in an interview with Kashtan.NEWS.

“We are not talking about the closure or liquidation of religious organizations in the Stalinist sense, when commissars in leather jackets came and arrested the priest, closed the church, turned it into a warehouse. This is not the case here; we are talking about termination. That is, in fact, the only thing that will change is that the religious organization will lose its status as a legal entity. For those religious organizations that lease state or municipal property, the changes will be drastic: they will be asked to leave. They will not be able to lease it further, and today there are more than 3,000 such leased properties. For rural communities that have built their own churches in villages, virtually nothing will change,” — explained Oleksandr Sagan.

Earlier, Sagan said that the UOC should not be expected to make any moves toward merging with other structures. The religious scholar is convinced that this course was announced by the Primate of the Church, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufriy of Kyiv and All Ukraine.