Expert about Zolochiv: Persecutors of UOC aim to root out love from life

The persecution of the UOC priest and believers in Zolochiv began with the intervention of local UGCC representatives. Photo: YouTube

The main task of the persecutors of the UOC, whose rhetoric is endless hatred and destruction, is to completely eradicate love from our lives and prevent us from starting any creative thinking. Journalist, media expert and film director Yuri Molchanov spoke about the situation in Zolochiv, Lviv region, where representatives of the UGCC, OCU and local authorities have harassed a cleric of the canonical Church, as well as about the reasons for the persecution of the Orthodox Church in the programme "Right to Faith”.

"For me, it still remains an anthropological secret how a man who puts on a cross, calls himself a priest, a bishop – urges for hatred," he said. “This is a fundamental substitution of notions. I now observe a tendency for the UGCC, as well as, perhaps, the Roman Catholics and their affiliated structures, such as the Ukrainian Catholic University, to engage directly in politics. And here we have a complete fundamental breakdown of foundations and concepts.”

In his opinion, politics cannot be without malice, and when the Church tries to defend certain political narratives in its rhetoric, "it will certainly sooner or later start speaking the language of politics and it will speak worldly malice”.

At the same time there is a global substitution of concepts, the expert stressed: "They are trying to take away in every possible way from the narratives of God, which are based on love. It seems to me that these forces have the number one task – to remove, to eradicate love in general from our lives, to eradicate peacekeeping and peace-loving rhetoric."

"Since 2014, only the rhetoric of destruction and elimination has been heard," he recalled. “And this is certainly applied to the religious life because one cannot create without loving, one cannot build destroying. Creation is very serious work, and destruction – take a sledgehammer in your hands and crash and thrash. And unification is a completely different process, complex, but creative, bright and beautiful. They’re concerned about one thing – so that we do not get to some creative thinking so that the algorithm of our thought does not go on the trajectory of reasoning about creation: how we live, and why we are infinitely at war, and with whom we are at war, and what is happening, where this war comes from, and who led to it, the reasons, the origins.”

The expert noted that in all this the Orthodox Church "as an institution is absolutely conservative, it has at its core a value matrix, which fits into one small book called the New Testament”. And it is this value matrix, which is a guide for the Orthodox in everything, that is being attacked "on all fronts" not only in Ukraine but on a global scale, "liberalism has actually turned into a religion, and we must understand that we are built into this process”. 

Therefore, according to the journalist, the believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church should be ready for persecution.

"Not these but there will be others who will be persecuted, there will be no nationalists – there will be some other tools. But we must be ready to be persecuted, persecuted for the fact that we just want to love, that we confess the absolute good, that we turn not just to our centuries-old but millennia-old roots, that we belong to the faith of Abraham and do not let draughts of new trends into us. We have closed and sealed our space and we do not allow sexual and other freedoms of this world into it, nor do we compromise with them. And this is unacceptable in their system of coordinates," summed up Yuri Molchanov.

As reported, earlier Metropolitan Filaret of Lviv and Galicia urged the head of the Lviv RSA to influence the process of inciting religious hatred in Zolochiv and ensure that the believers of the UOC have the same rights as those of other confessions.

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