Ukrainian President's Attempt To Create Autocephalous Church To Fail - Russian Lawmaker

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 16th December, 2018) The attempts of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to create an autocephalous church are highly unlikely to succeed, Russia's upper house constitutional committee chairman Andrei Klishas told Sputnik on Sunday.

On Saturday, Poroshenko announced the creation of the autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, following a "unification council" held in Kiev, at which Epiphany Dumenko, Metropolitan of Pereyaslavsky and Bila Tserkva of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP), was elected primate of the new church.

"An attempt to substitute the process of state-building in Ukraine with some new church project will fail. All that Poroshenko was able to do during the years of his presidency is to unite a bunch of schismatics around him under the name of Ukraine's 'local' church," Klishas said.

He noted that this project would soon be undoubtedly "buried by history," while the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) "would live for centuries.

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The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) said the canonical meaning of the "council" in Kiev was insignificant, and the possibility of recognizing Epiphany in the Orthodox world was a task "hardly possible to fulfill."

In turn, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople invited the elected head of Ukraine's new church structure to visit Istanbul to receive tomos of autocephaly on January 6, the patriarchate's press service told Sputnik.

The Moscow Patriarchate calls the situation around the autocephaly the "legalization of schism," saying that it would have catastrophic consequences and would affect millions of Christians in Ukraine and other countries, and has already broken the Eucharistic communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople.