AFFLICTED WITH WESTERNISM: Ukraine continues to drink the Kool-Aid that is destroying the country

In a brazen display of disrespect, Ukraine’s parliament lobbies the Ecumenical Patriarch to grant a schismatic Church full legitimacy and self-rule – all at once

by SERAPHIM HANISCHApril 26, 2018, 21:18

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The Department of External Relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) reported that on April 19, 2018, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, by Resolution No. 8284, supported the appeal of the President of Ukraine P. O. Poroshenko to His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I regarding the “granting of a Tomos of Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine”.

This means that the government of a nation asked for a religious authority to recognize a State Church.

In the Protestant and somewhat libertine or agnostic West, this may not seem like anything important as news. Since most constitutional governments make use of the notion of separation between Church and State (inaccurately attributing this separation to that of the United States’ Constitution), it seems crazy from our point of view to see a State government petition a Church hierarch for recognition of a “State Church.”

Thankfully, the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church’s Ukrainian Exarchate recognize this fact even more clearly than the West does.

In accordance with Article 35 of the Constitution of Ukraine, the Church is separate from the state, and therefore the Church decides on issues of Church life independently. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has canonical relations with Ecumenical Orthodoxy, did not appeal to Patriarch Bartholomew I to grant autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine nor did it authorise the President or deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to do so. In connection to the above-mentioned initiatives, the government is overstepping its constitutional boundaries and interfering in Church affairs.

Such actions by the Ukrainian state in the religious sphere could be justified only if the Church in Ukraine had a legally established state status, as it was in the history of many states and still remains in certain states of the world. However, since the Church in Ukraine today does not have government status and is separate from the state, then the state authorities have absolutely no grounds whatsoever to meddle in Church affairs.