“We will never recognize the OCU because it is not a Church” - Kipshidze

Vakhtang Kipshidze, deputy head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Synodal Department for Church Relations with Society and the Media, commented on the possibility of recognizing the OCU as a Russian Orthodox Church. According to him, such an event is impossible, given that the OCU is not a Church, and all its leaders are self-ordained for the Russian Orthodox Church. He said this in an interview with RTVI.

“I think that we will never recognize the OCU because the OCU is not, in fact, a Church <…> There is no other sense in the existence of the OCU, except for the destruction of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This is a dark twin that is designed to try to either lure believers or force them to join the OCU. For the conscience of a believer, it is impossible to recognize self-ordained priests. A person wakes up in the morning, goes to the store, buys a cassock, mitre, panagia and other attributes of the bishop’s vestments and says: “I am a bishop” – this is approximately the story that describes the emergence of the OCU <…> The meaning of the bishopric is that they are the successors of the power that the Savior himself transferred to the apostles through ordination, that is, elevation to the holy rank, that is, elevation to the priestly rank. That is, the elevation to the holy rank. I think we will never be able to recognize these people (OCU – RTVI note) as the heirs to the power of the apostles and we should not do so,” – Kipshidze said.

At the same time, the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church believes that the coexistence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the OCU may well take place if the Ukrainian government legislatively restricts the aggressive actions of schismatics against the UOC.

“The OCU is a political organization, it is not a church, it is a kind of battering ram directed against the canonical church. If the authorities satisfy their appetites to take away parishes and expel believers, then some kind of shaky balance will probably be achieved. As a matter of fact, the Kyiv Patriarchate, the predecessor of the OCU, existed from the early 1990s until 2018, when it was merged with the OCU. There were, of course, difficulties, but in those years the Ukrainian government took a more, let’s say, multipolar position and clearly did not support the schismatics from the Kyiv Patriarchate, allowing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the canonical Church, to exist in peace. There was a certain balance then,” – he added.

Earlier, the head of the OCU press service, Yevstratiy Zoria, said that the Russian Orthodox Church would sooner or later join the recognition of the Tomos of autocephaly of the OCU. According to Zoria, although the Russian Orthodox Church will be the last Local Church to accept the existence of the OCU, the Russian Church, like others, will accept the new reality.