UOC MP and Russian Orthodox Church

Once about 6 years ago, my friend, the priest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, Fr. Andrei Dudchenko posted a touching photo on his LiveJournal - Kyiv, autumn, a quiet street near the Pechersk Lavra, along which an old man in monastic clothes is walking, and a few steps away from him are two priests. The old man in the photo turned out to be His Beatitude Metropolitan Vladimir, the head of the UOC-MP, walking from somewhere to an evening service. After Moscow, it seemed like some kind of magic to me - even then I saw the limousines of the patriarch and employees of the Federal Security Service in the university temple, who examined the temple on the eve of the arrival of Alexy II.

Then I remembered the famous photo of the Serbian Patriarch Pavlo walking down the street in a crowd.

Everyone is tired of stories about Mercedes, watches and apartments of the Russian Orthodox Church, and to compare the Russian Orthodox Church and the UOC-MP, which is a self-governing part of the Russian Orthodox Church, only based on the external behavior and wealth of its hierarchs would be too superficial. The meaning is much deeper, and it lies in the global difference between Russia and Ukraine. Let’s say the story with Pussy Riot became known, and the group members received punishment thanks to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the story with Femen (if anyone doesn’t know, the group members climbed onto the bell tower of the ancient Church of Hagia Sophia and protested there in the nude against the law banning abortion) so and remained a local Kyiv event, and they did not receive punishment thanks to the UOC-MP, which then stated that “they will treat what happened with Christian humility.”

And so in everything - this is not Ukraine, the younger brother of the great empire, but Russia - an archaic wild country in comparison with Ukraine, which is moving towards Europe as much as possible.

To put it briefly, in Ukraine there was the “Orange Revolution”, thanks to which a whole generation grew up, which no Party of Regions will force to think in its own way, and in Russia - “Bolotnaya Square”, aimless mass carnival festivities, which, if they led to anything, This means the arrests of its activists and the deprivation of the deputy mandate of Deputy Gudkov, a man who already looked dubious in the opposition environment. In Ukraine, the smartest and most cunning President Kuchma was able to sit in the chair for only two terms, and then - during the second, his reign was accompanied by such scandals and such opposition speeches that in 2004 he could no longer help but leave power and safely disappeared from Ukrainian politics, while while autocracy and succession to the throne were actually established in Russia.

Naturally, in such a country such a church is not the bureaucratic, authoritarian apparatus of the Russian Orthodox Church, which instantly squeezes out any dissent, but a collection of brothers in Christ with completely different political views. And when the Uzhgorod archimandrite, rector of the Theological Academy of the UOC-MP, serves a memorial service for Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, the founding fathers of Ukrainian nationalism, no one is surprised that he is a clergyman of the church attended by the president, who hates both Bandera and Shukhevych. When the Cherkasy Metropolitan of the UOC MP says that the decision to anathematize Hetman Mazepa, imposed by the Russian Orthodox Church, was unfair, and proposes to cancel it, it does not occur to anyone to punish the metropolitan precisely because for the UOC MP Bandera, Shukhevych and Mazepa are one thing, but serving Christ's truth is something else entirely.

In Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church is ready to support any initiative - even the crazy cult of the “great victory”, even criticism of the opposition, whatever, because politics comes first there.

Once upon a time, I already compared two churches in another article and gave the example of Metropolitans Vladimir and Paul, to which I received a response from an ardent apologist of the Russian Orthodox Church, an employee of the Institute of CIS Countries, Kirill Frolov, who answered me that “the Serbian Patriarch Paul was, of course, holy, but didn’t understand politics.” Apparently, comparing the UOC-MP and the Russian Orthodox Church, one can say the same thing: someone chose holiness, humility and salvation, and someone chose politics and the spirit of this world. What is closer to the Savior, I think, is clear to everyone.