"No more Tomoses or exarchates": MP Knyazhytsky denied information about the alternative status of the UOC

Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of the European Solidarity party, claims that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will not receive any additional opportunities to maintain its status. Kniazhytskyi considers the information about a new Tomos or the creation of a Phanar exarchate for the UOC to be unfounded rumors. He said this in an interview with Gazeta.ua.

“At first, the authorities did not want to restrict the activities of the UOC at all. It seemed to them that Onufriy would be able to break with Moscow and then Zelensky would help him get another tomos, because he competes with Petro Poroshenko in everything. The authorities spoke about this openly. But there cannot be ten Orthodox churches. The Tomos we received was not given to the church, but to the Ukrainian people, the state, and the church at the same time. To receive the Tomos, then-President Petro Poroshenko appealed to the parliament, and the latter wrote an appeal to Bartholomew. But our government is sensitive to the mood of society. And when 80 percent of the population believes that the state should control the Moscow Patriarchate, and 60 percent believe that the Russian church should be closed, and in some regions this number is critically high, obviously, the government could no longer remain silent. Some priests of the UOC realized that they would not be granted the Tomos and began to think that they would receive some kind of temporary permission from Bartholomew to be a separate church. Later, they hoped that Constantinople would open an exarchate here and take all this Russian church into it. This is also impossible, because an exarchate is essentially an embassy. And according to the canonical rules of the Orthodox Church, each state has its own church. In our case, it is the Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” — said Knyazhytsky.