Former director of the “reserve” Ostapenko: "Monks of the OCU at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra do not understand their functions"

Maksym Ostapenko, former director general of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Reserve, spoke about the main problems facing the OCU in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The official is convinced that the OCU has too few monks to “revive Ukrainian Orthodox life” in the monastery. Ostapenko cited as an example the times when the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra was under the control of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and had between 200 and 500 monks. He spoke about this in a comment to Glavkom.

«When launching the process of removing the ‘Russian world’ from the Lavra, it is necessary to quickly formulate how to revive Ukrainian Orthodox monastic life in it so that the Lavra becomes a truly national shrine, like the Vatican for Italy or Westminster Abbey for Britain. It seems to me that the leadership of the OCU, including His Beatitude Epiphany, understands this. But the church is young and, as in any process that has begun relatively recently, the human factor is present here. The monastery community does not fully understand its function. I am very sorry that for those monks of the UOC who have quite strong Ukrainian positions, neither the state nor the OCU has been able to create mechanisms for transitioning to the church’s structures. Of course, I would like the OCU community to grow, but this is difficult until all legal issues are resolved,» — the official said.

Ostapenko noted that the problem with the OCU is that the organization is not changing its attitude toward the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, trying to use the monastery according to the same scheme that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has practiced for decades. According to the official, this is what deters most people from supporting the OCU.

«Creating a spiritual center is a laborious process; these are very delicate matters. In the OCU, many believed that it was necessary to replace one primate with another, to abandon all these ‘schemes’ and the misuse of objects—and there is nothing wrong with that. I know that many people are concerned that the OCU will become the UOC-MP-2. Unfortunately, in terms of moral, ethical, and organizational issues, these churches have a lot in common, and this scares many people away. Therefore, the search for the right values and the right mechanisms of interaction is a very important task. And here the initiative must come from the authorities,» — he added.

Earlier, one of the monks of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church community at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra reported that more than 170 members of the UOC monastic brotherhood still live in the monastery.