There is no ground for granting autocephaly to any Ukrainian church, as this is a desire of the Ukrainian civilian authorities, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, said on Thursday.
ASTANA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th October, 2018) There is no ground for granting autocephaly to any Ukrainian church, as this is a desire of the Ukrainian civilian authorities, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, said on Thursday.
He said that even the "dissident groups that could become the base for a new autocephalous church" had not united yet and had not voiced a clear concept of what kind of church it should be.
"For example, the leader of the dissidents, Filaret Denisenko [the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate] has left for the United States for three weeks, and he has not even received those exarchs from Constantinople. This proves that there is no reason for granting autocephaly to anyone in Ukraine now. The Ukrainian civilian authorities want it very much, but autocephaly is a purely ecclesiastical term," Hilarion told reporters on the sidelines of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Astana.
The metropolitan went on to say that autocephaly was never granted to civilian authorities.
"Ukraine as a state has been long autocephalous, this is an independent state, but the status of the church should be determined by the church itself, and today most of the Ukrainian Orthodox believers who belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church do not want any autocephaly, do not request autocephaly and will not accept it," Hilarion added.
