"Better than any sociology": residents of Kryvyi Rih do not distinguish between UOC and OCU

Residents of Kryvyi Rih (a city in the Dnipro region with a population of over 600,000) have little understanding of confessional differences and cannot distinguish between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the OCU and vice versa. In most cases, residents of Kryvyi Rih do not care which denomination’s church they attend. This is reported in a study by the regional publication “First Kryvyi Rih”.

It is reported that the journalists of “Pershyi Kryvyi Rih” conducted a survey among the townspeople and found out whether the residents of Kryvyi Rih know the difference between the OCU and the UOC. It turned out that many people confuse these two denominations. Some of the interviewed citizens immediately answered that they did not know the difference between the OCU and the UOC. Some of the respondents generally believe that the “Kyiv Patriarchate” still exists in Ukraine, not distinguishing it from the OCU.

A significant number of respondents said that they go to church very rarely – “to light candles for the fallen Ukrainian soldiers and on major holidays and do not care which patriarchate the church belongs to or which religious organization it is run by.”

We recently reported that the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) published data from a new opinion poll, according to which the majority of Ukrainians allegedly support the ban on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. According to the published data, 80% of Ukrainians support the ban of the UOC, 70% identify themselves as the OCU, and 61% of citizens voted for the creation of the Single Local Church on the basis of the OCU.