Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, There Is Freedom

The history of the Church contains many documents written by their authors not for posterity, but for their contemporaries. Such texts are valuable because there is no attempt to embellish them; people speak of what they saw and of how they saw it. A report recently published by a Constantinopolitan cleric regarding the events of December 2018 in Kyiv falls into this very category. It was written for a single person – Patriarch Bartholomew – and chronicles, day by day, the week during which the structure now known as the “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU) was established.

Almost eight years have passed. The OCU exists; it has been recognized by four of the fifteen Local Churches, and Ukrainian authorities are handing churches over to it, having first falsified documents and seized the properties, primarily by force, from their original owners (Note: the word used here is more like “creators” – in many cases, it was precisely the faithful of the UOC who built these seized churches from scratch – trans.): the parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Yet, it is this newly created structure that is presented to the world as the "united Church of the Ukrainian people." Now, however, faced with an eyewitness account of how this structure was actually formed, we must ask a question of significance to every Christian. It is neither a political nor even canonical question, but a spiritual one: where, in all of this, is the Holy Spirit?