Post by Deleted on Nov 13, 2023 12:02:26 GMT
spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/76858-lie-about-the-church-from-soviet-and-ukrainian-authorities-any-difference
On October 30, 2023, representatives of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations (AUCCRO) travelled to the United States. This organisation includes all the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish institutions in Ukraine, including the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. However, the UOC, despite being twice as large as any other religious institution in Ukraine, was denied the opportunity to join the delegation of Ukrainian clergy travelling to the USA. The official reason for the visit was "to share personal testimonies of the suffering of the Ukrainian people from Russian aggression". However, the church that suffered the most from Russian aggression was not invited.
In an interview with "Voice of America", OCU Metropolitan Evstratiy was asked why the UOC was not in the delegation. He responded, in the Leninist tradition, saying that the UOC didn't want to send a representative. This was a blatant lie, as the UOC clarified. The UOC wanted to send somebody, but was forbidden from doing so. There we go. Archpriest Mykola Danilevych of the UOC explained, "In reality... they didn't want to see us so as not to spoil the picture and the seemingly unanimous position of the AUCCRO. So, they should not say the untruth that supposedly we did not find it necessary to send someone there as Eustratiy said".
The AUCCRO claimed in the USA that "no Сhurch in Ukraine had been banned" and Evstratiy even had the audacity to say that Ukraine has an "unprecedented level of religious freedom".
How anybody could believe that as the godless government fights Christianity, closes churches, and throws bishops in prison, we do not know.
Yet all this has precedent in Ukraine. We only need to ask the 94 year-old Filaret Denisenko, self-styled "Patriarch of Kyiv and All Russia", who is recognised as a graceless schismatic by the entire Orthodox world except himself and a couple of bishops. He created this whole problem in the 1990s when he proclaimed himself Patriarch of Kyiv and split the Orthodox community in Ukraine.
During the Soviet era, Filaret was a high-ranking Russian Orthodox bishop. From 1962 he was a bishop of the ROC, and from 1966 the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, until he was deposed by the Holy Synod of the ROC in 1992 for his schismatic activites. "His Holiness" may be a Ukrainian nationalist now, who rejoices in birthday greetings from Zelensky, but in the Soviet era he was a strident defender of communism and the Soviet state. As a young bishop under Khrushchev, he is said to have put the locks on the closed churches himself early in the morning. He used to lambast priests who showed any sign of anti-Soviet dissent. Moreover, he constantly travelled to the West to proclaim the amazing and unprecedented state of religious freedom enjoyed by citizens of the USSR - though at one point, he apparently even refused to meet American delegations of clergymen visiting the USSR, he was so imbued with a hateful anti-Western mentality. Of course, his views are different now. But his mentality remains the same - that of a bishop formed under Stalin (it is even said Filaret adopted Stalin's manner of speech deliberately), under the watchful guise of the local party bosses.
Filaret's disciples are the ones ruling the OCU today, such as Metropolitan Evstratiy - who proclaims the amazing state of religious freedom in Ukraine, like Filaret, his spiritual father did 60 years ago.
The man at the helm of all this, Volodymyr Oleksandrovich Zelensky, is a successor, not in ideology, but in mentality, of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. He acts quite a lot like him - and the religious leaders, the ones who obey him, tell the same tales to a Western audience as in Soviet times. Ideology does not matter - mentality does. And the Ukrainian government, and a number of Ukrainian church leaders, have the same mentality as in the time when the slogan was not "Glory to Ukraine" but "Workers of the World, Unite!"
On October 30, 2023, representatives of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations (AUCCRO) travelled to the United States. This organisation includes all the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish institutions in Ukraine, including the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. However, the UOC, despite being twice as large as any other religious institution in Ukraine, was denied the opportunity to join the delegation of Ukrainian clergy travelling to the USA. The official reason for the visit was "to share personal testimonies of the suffering of the Ukrainian people from Russian aggression". However, the church that suffered the most from Russian aggression was not invited.
In an interview with "Voice of America", OCU Metropolitan Evstratiy was asked why the UOC was not in the delegation. He responded, in the Leninist tradition, saying that the UOC didn't want to send a representative. This was a blatant lie, as the UOC clarified. The UOC wanted to send somebody, but was forbidden from doing so. There we go. Archpriest Mykola Danilevych of the UOC explained, "In reality... they didn't want to see us so as not to spoil the picture and the seemingly unanimous position of the AUCCRO. So, they should not say the untruth that supposedly we did not find it necessary to send someone there as Eustratiy said".
The AUCCRO claimed in the USA that "no Сhurch in Ukraine had been banned" and Evstratiy even had the audacity to say that Ukraine has an "unprecedented level of religious freedom".
How anybody could believe that as the godless government fights Christianity, closes churches, and throws bishops in prison, we do not know.
Yet all this has precedent in Ukraine. We only need to ask the 94 year-old Filaret Denisenko, self-styled "Patriarch of Kyiv and All Russia", who is recognised as a graceless schismatic by the entire Orthodox world except himself and a couple of bishops. He created this whole problem in the 1990s when he proclaimed himself Patriarch of Kyiv and split the Orthodox community in Ukraine.
During the Soviet era, Filaret was a high-ranking Russian Orthodox bishop. From 1962 he was a bishop of the ROC, and from 1966 the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, until he was deposed by the Holy Synod of the ROC in 1992 for his schismatic activites. "His Holiness" may be a Ukrainian nationalist now, who rejoices in birthday greetings from Zelensky, but in the Soviet era he was a strident defender of communism and the Soviet state. As a young bishop under Khrushchev, he is said to have put the locks on the closed churches himself early in the morning. He used to lambast priests who showed any sign of anti-Soviet dissent. Moreover, he constantly travelled to the West to proclaim the amazing and unprecedented state of religious freedom enjoyed by citizens of the USSR - though at one point, he apparently even refused to meet American delegations of clergymen visiting the USSR, he was so imbued with a hateful anti-Western mentality. Of course, his views are different now. But his mentality remains the same - that of a bishop formed under Stalin (it is even said Filaret adopted Stalin's manner of speech deliberately), under the watchful guise of the local party bosses.
Filaret's disciples are the ones ruling the OCU today, such as Metropolitan Evstratiy - who proclaims the amazing state of religious freedom in Ukraine, like Filaret, his spiritual father did 60 years ago.
The man at the helm of all this, Volodymyr Oleksandrovich Zelensky, is a successor, not in ideology, but in mentality, of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. He acts quite a lot like him - and the religious leaders, the ones who obey him, tell the same tales to a Western audience as in Soviet times. Ideology does not matter - mentality does. And the Ukrainian government, and a number of Ukrainian church leaders, have the same mentality as in the time when the slogan was not "Glory to Ukraine" but "Workers of the World, Unite!"