OCU spokesman accuses UOC of protecting its churches from seizures

OCU spokesperson Yevstratiy Zoria accused the clergy and faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of opposing the raider seizures of churches and other church buildings. Zoria said that in this way the UOC is preventing the transfer of its churches to the OCU, while expressing hope that the adopted anti-church law No. 3894, aimed at banning the UOC, will be able to influence the situation. He said this in a commentary to Espresso.

“I would not say that it has become easier, because the procedure is multi-stage. And it is not quite easy for a community to go through all the stages of this procedure legally. Moreover, representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate are mostly trying to prevent the community from implementing their decision by all means: from preventing the community meeting to sabotaging the decision already made,” – he said.

At the same time, Zoria expects that when Law No. 3894, aimed at restricting the activities of the UOC, fully comes into force, the faithful of the Church will have to make the “right choice” or face a ban.

“In principle, it should be expected that when communities begin to receive the order already defined by law to eliminate their affiliation with religious organizations centered in the aggressor country (i.e., the Russian Federation with the Moscow Patriarchate), this issue will be clearly, specifically and quite acutely raised by the communities,” – Zoria said.

Earlier, Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of the European Solidarity party, confirmed that the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed the scandalous anti-church law No. 3894, aimed at banning the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which was adopted, among other things, to take away churches from the UOC. Knyazhytsky believes that since not all settlements in Ukraine have churches of the OCU, people may not realize that their “priests have ties to Moscow.” Thus, the law banning the UOC is aimed at correcting this.