Filaret: We will demand a new Tomos

Filaret Denisenko. Photo: comments.ua

The Head of the UOC-KP Filaret Denisenko said that his structure would demand a new Tomos from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Filaret spoke about this in an interview with Apostrophe.

The Head of the Kyiv Patriarchate believes that the Tomos, granted by Patriarch Bartholomew at the “Unification Council” in January 2018, prescribes the dependence of the newly created religious structure on Phanar.

In his opinion, in order to get rid of this dependence, one needs to opt out of the Tomos with the current contents.

The Head of the UOC-KP believes that the termination of the “transitions” from the UOC to the OCU is due to the fact that he Tomos is “fake” because “if the Tomos were valid, the transition from the UOC-MP would continue in the future.”

“The Patriarch of Constantinople must issue for us a tomos similar to that of the Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian Churches. This is a kind of the Tomos we need. And we hoped that it would be like that back in 2018,” Filaret emphasized.

According to him, “we demanded, demand and will demand until the end such a tomos as other Churches have. We will stand firmly in the position of patriarchy. If the Ecumenical Patriarch gives the new Tomos to the patriarchy, it will mean that we really have become an autocephalous, independent Church.”

Mr. Denisenko said that “when it came to granting Tomos during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, we were faced up to the condition: to become part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople similarly to the Cretan Church. So they told us: you, the Ukrainian Church, like the Cretan Church, should be part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. We refused this point blank then. We don’t need such dependence.”

He said that the UOC-KP had withdrawn from "the structure of the so-called OCU", because it did not want to be dependent on the Patriarch of Constantinople, and "continues to exist as the Kyiv Patriarchate, as an independent church."

Filaret promised that his religious structure would wait "for the time when the Ukrainian Church receives a real Tomos of autocephaly."

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that, according to Filaret, Tomos is revenge on Moscow for not participating in the Cretan Council.

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