Polish Church suspends co-operation with RCC due to its support for OCU

Metropolitan Savva, Primate of the Polish Orthodox Church. Photo: FB of the Polish Church

One of the decisions of the Council of Bishops of the Polish Orthodox Church, which took place on 24 October 2023, was to suspend bilateral cooperation with the Roman Catholic Church due to the "lack of satisfactory results" of its work.

The Polish resource KAI tried to find out from the Polish Church the reasons for this decision, but they refused to comment. At the same time, journalists spoke with the co-chairman of the commission on the part of the RCC, Bishop Adam Bab.

He said that the commission was mainly concerned with helping refugees from Ukraine. Bab does not specify, but apparently, it was also about helping to establish parishes of the OCU. The Catholic bishop said that they did not separate the representatives of the OCU and the UOC, and the Polish Orthodox Church "noticed this and proposed to take into account the canonical assessment of the situation".

"In their opinion, the autocephalous Church (the OCU – Ed.) is not a canonical Church, and they have doubts about the very procedure of declaring autocephaly and even about the validity of ordinations," Bab stated. “From the canonical point of view, this is not our concern, we were simply guided by the necessity to help people in need, without analysing their church affiliation. We were guided here simply by the love of neighbour rather than canons."

As reported, in August 2023, the OCU began a "chaplaincy mission" in Poland.

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