Moscow Patriarchate Assails Yushchenko’s Intervention in Church Affairs

MOSCOW. Jan 14 (Interfax) – The Ukrainian president’s initiative to set up a commission for the unification of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the breakaway Kyiv Patriarchate is casting doubts on the secular nature of the Ukrainian state, the Moscow Patriarchate said.

“Viktor Yushchenko’s insistence on forming a unified local church’ with active assistance from the state arouses surprise,” Archpriest Nikolai Balashov, a spokesman for the Moscow patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, told Interfax.

Father Nikolai made this statement in remarks about Yushchenko’s initiative, voiced on Friday to the Synod of the Kyiv Patriarchate, unrecognized in the Orthodox world.

“The leader of a secular state – as Ukraine is defined in the constitution – has formulated his program regarding the future of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Moreover, he is making proposals on how many bishops and priests a joint theologian commission, to be charged with the task of forming a new church, must have,” Father Nikolai said.

Meanwhile, “representatives of the Kyiv Patriarchate are not bishops or priests in the real sense of the word, since they have no legal ordination, while their head Mikhail Denisenko [former Metropolitan Filaret] has nothing to do with the church at all, as he was recently excommunicated. These circumstances are being utterly disregarded,” he said.

“This position is shared by all of the world’s local Orthodox churches and has been confirmed by its high representatives on many occasions, last in July 2005,” Father Nikolai said.

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