Uniate chaplain stirs up animosity against the UOC

Chaplain of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church Nikolay Medinskiy proposed “to get” the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to change its name and accused it of hostility to the “Ukrainian spirit” and non-canonicity. He told about it in his interview with portal online.ua.

As a proof to the ideas of the “Russian world” within the UOC the Uniate chaplain believed derivatives of the word “Russia” – Greek variant “Rus” that was used in the old service books) – in one of the Acathistos written in the Old Slavic language, which he had bought in the UOC store.

According to Medinskiy, every UOC priest who he calls “Moscow” is an apologist of the “Russian world”, even if he is “good”.

The Greek-Catholic proposes to use “civilized” methods of pressure on the UOC: “first of all, to make the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine adopt a similar name, i.e. Russian Church in Ukraine”.

Furthermore, the Uniate chaplain thinks that within the Orthodox Church there cannot be a status of “self-governed church”, while the Moscow Patriarchate has no right to act on the territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Herewith he refers to granting autocephaly to the Polish Orthodox Church by the Constantinople Patriarchate (the metropolitan of the Polish Church eventually repented and adopted autocephaly from the Moscow Patriarchate – ed.)
In fact, all internal church affairs are dealt with by the UOC irrespective of the Moscow Patriarchate.