OCU recognized by all Local Churches, - religious scholar Sagan

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 the organization headed by Epiphany Dumenko has been recognized by all Local Churches except the Russian Orthodox Church. Sagan claims that the formation of the OCU has been successful over the past six years, and the only thing left to do is to establish full communion with world Orthodoxy. He said this in a comment to the media.

“For six years, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has gone through quite difficult times. But in the end, I can say that these six years after the Unification Council are a stage of formation, which the OCU is going through successfully. The contradictions that arose are fading away. The church is becoming a subject not only of internal Ukrainian realities, but also of external inter-Orthodox realities. This is a significant result, and we hope that these steps and the church’s activities will bear significant fruit. It will also bear fruit in the field of concelebration, because, except for the Moscow Patriarchate, the Church has been recognized by all, (Media version: according to the canons, if the Church does not recognize the Tomos, it breaks off service with the Church that issued the Tomos. Except for the MP, all the others accepted the Tomos by default, which means they recognized it – ed.) So now we are working on concelebration,” – said Oleksandr Sagan.

Earlier, Oleksandr Sagan named the condition under which the OCU will be able to achieve the status of patriarchate. The religious scholar claims that Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople previously said that Ukraine could have a patriarchate, but for this it is necessary to complete the procedure of unification of Ukrainian churches.