'The Odesa Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate published an official statement regarding the possibility of constructing a Greek Catholic church in Odesa. "In Odesa, where the vast majority of the residents are believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, there is such a small number of Greek Catholics that there is no need to build not only a cathedral but even a prayer house for the Uniates," stated Metropolitan Ahafanhel (Savin) of Odesa and Izmail of the UOC, who is also a deputy of the Odesa Regional State Administration and a representative of the Party of Regions.

The statement reads that "the expected construction in Odesa, on the territory of the Prokhoriv Public Garden, of a cathedral of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the Uniates' attempt to aggressive expand in the Odesa region."

As of March 2010, there are 10,000 Greek Catholics in Odesa. In addition, according to the Chancellor of Odesa-Crimean Exarchate of the UGCC, Volodymyr Zhdan, there are several large Greek Catholic communities in Odesa Oblast, such as Ilichivska, Rozdilnianska, Berezovska, etc. '

http://www.risu.org.ua/en/index/all_news/confessional/interchurch_relations/37743/

Honestly I find this statement quite disgusting.

I again thank the Lord not to have converted to Orthodoxy.

Just a follow-up to my original post. Because of size limitations in posting a Title to a new thread, the title I meant to put was "Metropolitan of Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) in Odesa denies Ukrainian Greek Catholics right to build Church" but that couldn't fit in so I posted the title that would fit.

I believe this story occurred at the same time the Odesa administration had given some buildings to the MP in Odesa. I think this also comes down to the question of "freedom of conscience" in Ukraine in the understanding of the Russian Orthodox Church's branch in Ukraine (UOC-MP). 10,000 Ukrainian Catholics would surely deserve a parish in North America should they want to build one; why should Ukraine be any different, regardless of where it is to be built?

Try "MP denies right of UGCC to build church in Odessa"

The entire issue of the Crimea is geopolitical and not religious. Power politics played for the highest stakes.

Thanks Stuart. If the Mods wish to change the title that's fine by me. By the way, Odesa is not part of the Crimea or the Crimean question. It is a separate oblast in Ukraine. However, like in Crimea, I believe the MP Metropolitan in Odesa is engaging in politics (i.e. propagation of the "Russkiy Myr" as opposed to Ukrainian) as well.

The issue is closely tied to the extension of basing rights for the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.

Very well, but Odessa is not in fact in the Crimea. Anyway, this kind of linkage between geopolitics and religious freedom is unworthy of the Russian Orthodox Church (Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate). Why should a hierarch of a non-Catholic Church get to decide the needs of an Eastern Catholic Church?

Disgusting, says I!

No, you are correct. The strategic objective is, ultimately, to detach that part of Ukraine from the rest of the country, giving Russia complete control over the northern coast of the Black Sea.

As to why the Moscow Patriarchate puts in its oar:

1. Failure to come to terms with the continued survival of the UGCC.
2. Failure to accept the legitimacy of the UGCC among the people of Ukraine.
3. Perceptions of the UGCC representing a moral challenge to the legitimacy of the MP, on the basis of its witness against and refusal to collaborate with the Communist regime.
4. The desire to align itself with the objectives of the Russian state, whose aim of recapturing the near-abroad becomes more transparent every day.

The Moscow Patriarchate, through Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, has been sending very positive messages lately to the Catholic Church. How can this be reconciled with the tension clearly still existing in Ukraine? And to what extent can the Moscow Patriarchate be seen as distinct from the national security state of Vladimir Putin?

I agree with Stuart K on this one, as on so many other issues.
This kind of behavior in the Name of Christ is outrageous and invites people toward atheism.

I think it's completely illegitimate for one Church to interfere in the internal matters of another Church, or to deny the right of this or that Church even to exist.

Competition among religions to a good thing as long as the playing field is even.

It disturbs me that a Bishop would use such a derogatory term like Uniates.



Ten thousand people is not a small minority. Not allowing one Church for 10,000 people that is insane! That’s the size of a small Eparchy.

I also find it scary that a Bishop is also a state deputy and has the power to deny another Church the right to build a house of worship.



This is more in the realm of aggressively denying the freedom of religion and the peaceful co-existence of Greek Catholics by the Orthodox Church than a Greek Catholic conspiracy to aggressively expand in the Odesa region.
Lord have mercy!

It's not derogatory to them. That, I think, is the point: the Russians consider the Greek Catholics to be an alien imposition in their canonical territory, an attempt to subvert the Orthodox Church from within. The truthfulness, indeed, the utter improbability of such claims, does not enter into the picture.

On the former point, I believe one needs to understand that whatever positive messages the MP may send Rome, the MP will demand that the Vatican stop the Ukrainian Catholic Church from developing or growing. The MP has already hinted before that should the Vatican not deal with the Ukrainian Catholic situation there will be no chance of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch meeting the Pope. This is unchristian never mind blackmail. The MP cannot reconcile itself to the fact that of all the lands in the former Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, etc.) the most active per-person church attendance area is in the Ukrainian Catholic heartland of Halychyna.

As for the former point about the MP vis-a-vis Putin the K.G.B. autocrat, I personally believe they read from the same book in foreign affairs. Putin flipped at the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. Likewise during the MP's visit to Ukraine the year before this, the main thrust to the faithful was not so much a moral one, as that Ukraine NOT join NATO. I still cannot get over the fact that while the UGCC was suffering under communist rule, today's MP, Kirill, at the tender age of 25 in 1971 was chosen to be the Russian Orthodox Church's representative to the World Council of Churches. Now ask yourself, knowing that these positions would have at the very least required the Communist Kremlin's approval, how did the future MP land this job? Former Russian Orthodox priest Gleb Yakunin, who was imprisoned under the Soviets, was I believe excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church AFTER the Soviet collapse for revealing the K.G.B. connections of modern-day Russian Orthodox prelates. You can look up under Keston College what Yakunin I believe said about today's MP back then.

Putin propagates that Ukraine is not a nation. Likewise, the MP propagates that Ukraine belongs to the "Russian world", completely ignoring Ukraine's separate history. The MP, imho, is just as much a secular imperialistic entity as it is a spiritual one, and this was true of it under the Tsars as well. It is the same symbiotic relationship between the ROC and state. I mean the MP even celebrates the anniversary of the founding of the atheist Soviet Union's development of nuclear weapons. The MP twists history and ignores Stalinist repression during WW2, and argues that the Great Patriotic War was a fight for Russian Orthodoxy. (the Great Patriotic War excluding the inconvenient period of Stalinist/Hitlerite collusion in 1939-41 when Eastern Europe was divvied up and repressed). I already posted this link elsewhere as to the possibility of the ROC being engaged in Russia's new Cold War with the West.

"French secret service fear Russian cathedral a spying front
The French secret service has reportedly expressed alarm over plans for a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Paris, fearing it will be used by Moscow as a front for spies."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...ying-front.html

These are serious questions as to how much the ROC sees its mission in the Russian imperial context, and how much it sees it as spiritual.

I guess I should also stop assuming that in posting a story from the "old country" that posters from North America and the rest of the world will automatically realize what is meant when the article states that Moscow's Metropolitan in Odesa is a deputy in the state assembly from the Partiya Regioniv or Regions Party.

First off, the Regions Party to which the MP Metropolitan in question belongs is the party headed by today's pro-Kremlin President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych - the man who tried to steal and falsify the presidential elections in 2004 during the Orange Revolution along with his cohorts as we have learned from such accounts as the Independent's Askold Krushelnycky's book on the Orange Revolution http://www.amazon.co.uk/Orange-Revolution-Personal-Journey-Ukrainian/dp/0436206234. Nobody was ever brought to account for falsifying the election results (though Russian President Putin congratulated Yanukovych TWICE even before the results were announced).

This Yanukovych has a criminal record and his political party basically started out as the political wing of the most vicious mafia clan in Ukraine - the Donetsk mafia from Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine's current parliament is run to a great degree by competing clans, the biggest and most vicious being the Donetsk. As Krushelnycky made clear in his book, Yanukovych even attempted to get a "sympathy vote" during those 2004 elections after pro-western Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned. In this regard, Yanukovych travelled to Ukrainian Catholicism's heartland in Ivano-Frankivsk. There Yanukovych was to attempt to put on a show of being the victim of an assassination attempt by pretend Ukrainian nationalists. The whole thing turned into a farce when Yanukovych was hit by an egg which he mistook for the cue to fall as if struck by a bullet. It's on youtube actually.

So this Yanukovych is the leader of the political party to which this Metropolitan of Odesa belongs. Yanukovych is now clamping down slowly on freedom of the press in Ukraine (5-yi Kanal) as Putin did before him and Yanukovych only promotes the Russian Orthodox Church or as it is euphemistically known in Ukraine - the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate).

So this is telling of the Odesa Metropolitan's view on politics. There are no doubt religious and sincere bishops, priests, and laity in this Orthodox Church but one must not forget that the largest Orthodox Church in Ukraine is not this one but the uncanonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyivan Patriarchate) which does not toe the Kremlin line.

Metropolitan Ahanfanhel of Odesa is known for his anti-Catholic and anti-Ukrainian, pro-Russian views. I threw his name in google in Ukrainian, my first language, to look up what backs up his reputation. I found this interesting article from the R.I.S.U. site, which site I used in the OP, by Volodymyr Melnyk which notes the peculiar fact that in 2002 this Ahanfanhel had written about the similarity of the Communist and Orthodox worldviews in that: "both are of similar mind in questions of human well-being".
http://risu.org.ua/ua/index/monitoring/33219/

This should not be as surprising as it seems. In Russia, Communist leader Zyuganov had high praise for the Russian Orthodox Church. In Ukraine, what is quite outstanding is that one of the most zealous pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian communists, Natalya Vitrenko, could become the head of a Union of Orthodox Women. http://risu.org.ua/ua/index/all_news/community/religion_and_policy/36878/

What allies the Communists and Russian Orthodox is their negative view of Ukrainian Catholics and Ukrainian national-consciousness.

I wish this were not the case. I really do. And I am not here to grind an axe. But there really is some substance to Ukrainian Catholics being outraged by the actions of the MP's Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The divide the MP is creating in Ukraine is not merely religious now, but political, and civilizational for that matter: what constitutes freedom of religion?

Hospody Pomylui. Lord Have Mercy.

We certainly have enough faithful for the Synod to have erected an Exarchate for Odessa and Crimea with His Grace +Vasyl (Ivasiuk) ministering to the thousands of faithful who are there. Since the LDS have managed a place of worship in Odessa along with other new-comer sects, one would hope the UGCC could find a place of worship.