No one requires the UOC to change the calendar - the head of the DESS

The head of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS), Viktor Yelenskyy, has once again said that the state does not require the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to renounce Christ or change the liturgical calendar. Yelenskyy claims that the Church is hiding from the faithful the DESS regulation, which, according to him, contains only a requirement for the UOC to renounce the Moscow Patriarchate. About this he told in an interview with Channel 5.

“The content of this prescription is hidden from the believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Immediately after the promulgation of this prescription, one of the hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church said in his Sunday sermon that the state has given us an ultimatum and requires us to renounce Christ. Neither to renounce Orthodoxy, nor to change, say, the calendar from Julian to New Julian, nothing like that is required by the order, ” Viktor Yelenskyy emphasized.

We shall remind you that the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Ruslan Stefanchuk, said that the changes in the calendar of church and state holidays are of a deep ideological nature. According to him, these reforms are intended to define Ukraine’s place in the civilized world and revise its national identity.