Full autocephaly

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko is going to offer the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to create a single autocephalous Orthodox Church in the country.

"I, as the president, decided to turn to the Ecumenical Patriarch, to his Holiness, with a request to provide the tomos to the Ukrainian independent, more precisely, local autocephalous church," Poroshenko said at a meeting with the leaders of parliamentary factions.

Poroshenko called on the Supreme Rada to support his appeal. The President expressed the hope that the autocephalous church will be created in Ukraine before the 1030th anniversary of the baptism of Rus', which will be celebrated on May 31, 2018.

In the case of the creation of the Local Church in Ukraine, its elected patriarch will be recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul.

In the Kiev Patriarchate, the initiative of Poroshenko was approved. "The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate unanimously supports all efforts aimed at recognizing the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine by the all -offishness of the universal Patriarch Bartholomey and the Constantinople Church mother, as well as to overcome the existing church division, approval of a unified local Orthodox Church," the statement on the website of the UOC REP. The other day, on behalf of the entire bishop of the Kyiv Patriarchate, the Ecumenical Patriarch was sent a similar appeal, added to the church.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate expressed doubt about the success of a new attempt to unite the Ukrainian Orthodox. "I think that this will all end with a big zilch, as it was many times before. There will be a lot of noise in the media, and this will end. Why? Because they build a foundation on which it is impossible to build in principle. It is necessary to start with the UOC (MP. - Ed.), And not with its separate parts. The jacket is not sewn to the butt, but vice versa, the butt of the butt ," Facebook head of the department of external church relations of the UOC -MP Archpriest Nikolai Danilievich. According to the cleric, the UOC -MP supports the creation of a single Ukrainian church, but only "on a canonical basis."

In 2016, the appeal to Patriarch Bartholomew to recognize the independence of the Ukrainian church from the Moscow Patriarchate was adopted by the Verkhovna Rada . The parliamentarians assured the Primate that the believers of Ukraine "did not perceive the idea of ​​church unity with the blessed Patriarch of Moscow Cyril, who not only did not defend the Orthodox Christians of Ukraine, who suffer from Russian aggression, but also became one of the main ideologists of the" Russian world ".