UOC spokesman: We won’t agree to name change and will protect our rights

Deputy Head of UOC DECR Protopriest Nikolai Danilevich

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church will not agree to name change and will protect its rights by all possible legal means, said the Deputy Head of the UOC DECR Protopriest Nikolai Danilevich on the ZIK channel on December 24.

“We will protect ourselves by all legal means,” Father Nikolai noted. “This question will be considered in courts. We will challenge this and not agree to name change, because by this renaming they want to make us strangers in our country.”

The DECR Deputy Head also noted that Law No. 5309 itself is controversial.

“Today Russia is an aggressor state, and what should we do tomorrow if it is not an aggressor state? Laws are not written for the future. If laws are written for half an hour ahead, there will be no order in the country,” the cleric noted.

Also, Father Nikolai noted that the Ukrainian authorities confuse legal matters with church canons.

“Legally, the UOC centre is located in Kiev. And the canonical communion, the remembrance of the Patriarch are canonical things, which are nothing for the state. How we baptize or do not baptize, who we have a prayer connection with, and who we do not have it with – this does not concern the state. We do not live in the times of the Byzantine Empire, where church canons had the power of state laws. <...> And what the Verkhovna Rada does is a confusion of church and canonical issues with legal issues,” said Father Nikolai.

As the UOJ reported, on December 22, 2018, Petro Poroshenko signed anti-church bill No. 5309, which obliges the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as the Church, "whose governing centre is in the aggressor country", to change its name and become the "Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine".

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