BELGRADE (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 05th January, 2019) Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) Irinej drew parallels on Friday between the church schism in Ukraine and similar attempts to create an "autocephalous church" in Montenegro.
In December, Montenegrin President Milo Dukanovic said that the country's leadership would seek independence of the "autocephalous Montenegrin church" from the SOC. Archpriest Velibor Jomic, the coordinator for the legal counsel of the SOC Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral, told Sputnik then that over the last few months, the Montenegrin authorities denied 10 percent of the Serbian clergy the right to stay in the country.
"The temptation is the same in our very close and brotherly Ukraine, where the passion filled chauvinist-Russophobes, led by corrupt politicians with the assistance of Uniates and, unfortunately, with the uncanonical cooperation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, deepened and spread the existing schism and seriously jeopardized the unity of Orthodoxy in general," the patriarch said in a Christmas address, posted on the SOC website.
He stressed that those "who speak of a so-called 'Montenegrin Church'" and do not recognize "the ancient Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Coastlands" were "forgetting that salvation is not conditioned upon a claim of who is Serbian and who is Montenegrin."
The vast majority of Orthodox believers in Montenegro are parishioners of the SOC's Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral, Eparchy of Budimlja and Niksic and Eparchy of Zahumlje and Herzegovina. The non-canonical Montenegrin Orthodox Church is headed by "patriarch" Mihailo Dedeic, who was earlier defrocked by the SOC.
On December 15, a "unification council" was held in Kiev on the initiative of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Constantinople Patriarch Bartholomew, during which Epiphany Dumenko was elected head of the new "autocephalous church." The council was attended by representatives of mostly non-canonical structures, which are not recognized by the world's Orthodox churches, except for the Constantinople Patriarchate. According to Ukrainian media, only two bishops of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) participated in the council. The Ukrainian authorities expect to get tomos of autocephaly from Constantinople in early January.
The Moscow Patriarchate described the situation as the "legalization of schism," stressing that it would have catastrophic consequences and affect millions of Christians in Ukraine and other countries. It also said that 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."
