Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Russian scholar: Ukrainian Church has right to independence


Russian religious expert and journalist Sergei Chapnin explains why the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople has every reason to grant the status of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In an op-ed published by Vedomosti, Chapnin noted that the issue of Ukrainian autocephaly dates back to the early 20th century, while those associated with the status of the Kyiv church goes back to the late 17th century.

"But if the Patriarch of Constantinople preserves the continuity of his institutions for almost 1500 years, the Moscow Patriarchate, after the total destruction of all church institutions in 1917 and the re-emergence of some of them in the mid-1940s, cannot even think in terms of centuries. In the end, when it was necessary to investigate and determine the status of the Kyiv church at the end of the 17th century, Moscow failed to figure out the content of historical documents, but this did not stop them from suggesting that Constantinople in 1686 gave them Ukraine in its entirety," Chapnin writes.

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