Moscow Patriarchal Church in Ukraine Will Continue After Autocephaly but as Marginal Force, Yurash Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 15 – The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate will remain in existence after Ukraine forms its own autocephalous national church, but the Russian church will be “marginalized, reduced in size and cease to be influential in the Orthodox world,” according to Andrey Yurash, a specialist on the politics of religion at Lviv University. 

            Organizationally, he says, “the UOC MP will gradually split apart, with all the more active bishops and priests leaving it because they share the ideology of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.” Some have already signaled their intentions (enovosty.com/news_politics/full/1511-chto-budet-s-upc-mp-posle-polucheniya-ukrainoj-tomosa-religioved-dal-prognoz).

            “I am convinced,” Yurash continues, “that there are several dozen hierarchs who under the circumstances will be ready to join the majority of their priesthood to the movement toward autocephaly.” That will change the face of religious life in Ukraine far more quickly than many now assume. 

            At the same time, however, he says that the UOC MP “as a structure in unity with the Moscow Patriarchatee will be preserved.” No one should have any doubts about that as 14 to 19 percent of the Ukrainian population remains “conscious supporters of the Moscow jurisdiction” and they will be given all the necessary conditions to continue to follow its lead.

            But with time, that church “will be marginalized, reduced in side and not occupy the niche it does now of the most numerous and influential single canonical structure in the Orthodox milieu.  All elements of its identity with the creation of a national church will be destroyed.  [And] it will lose the independent organic unity” it has had for the las 25 years.