Former UOC priest: "When I transferred to the OCU, less than 20% of my former parishioners remained with me"

Former cleric of the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Orest Dragina, who defected to the schism several months ago, complained that most of the parishioners of the church where he serves did not support his choice and did not want to join the OCU with him. According to the former priest of the UOC, less than 20% of the total number of parishioners followed him, while the rest remained faithful to the canonical Church. He spoke about this on the YouTube channel “Viche.”

“I will give you an example from my own life. The last place of my ministry was the church of St. Seraphim of Sarov. I built this church from scratch together with the people and organized the community. It turns out that we have been serving there for 12 years. I had a lot of people, a lot of parishioners, and I had quite a lot of authority. And when I took the step that I took (I transferred from the UOC to the OCU – ed.), probably only a fifth, maybe even less, of the people accepted this step and followed me. There are some people who also sympathize, even congratulated me, but they are not in the church yet. I explain it to myself this way: social ties come into play here. If a man wants to, his wife won’t let him. If both the man and the woman want to, their relatives will be offended, and they don’t want to spoil their relationships with them,” – Dragina said.

Earlier, Orest Dragina talked about why he decided to join the schism. Draginda stated that he feels “inner peace” in the OCU, and the ministers of the OCU seem “cheerful and accessible” to the former priest of the UOC.