METROPOLITAN ONUFREY: I DO NOT PROMOTE THE "RUSSIAN WORLD" AND OTHER POLITICAL CONCEPTS
Religiia v Ukraine, 21 July 2015
On 20 July the head of the UPTs (Moscow patriarchate), Metropolitan Onufrey, described in an interview with the Ukrainian publication Fraza his apolitical position and the patriotism of the UPTs [Ukrainian Orthodox Church], Religiia v Ukraine reports.
Responding to the question whether the church should intervene in politics, the UPTs head said: "The church should be engaged in its immediate business—to help people find God and strive for eternal life. . . . The church should not immerse itself in politics. That impoverishes her and reduces the church's unlimited potential for resolving immediate tasks."
Consistently, the UPTs head answered negatively a question of a journalist: "Do you make an effort to promote the concept of the 'Russian World'? Representatives of other Orthodox confessions of Ukraine very often speak about this." Metropolitan Onufrey declared: "I do not know on what they base their claim. Any person can pick up my statements in the past years, sermons, articles, and interviews. And also the official documents of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Nowhere does it approve promoting any political concept or idea. The Lord has laid upon me the duty of primate, who is responsible for the unity and preservation of our church and for avoiding schisms and infighting within it. Proceeding from this, it has not even entered my head to be, one way or another, involved in politics. In any of its forms. After all, our church incorporates people of diverse ideological views, and the primate is obliged to unite, and not to divide them. We all should, in the first place, strive for Christ. After all, only the Lord can show us the way to resolve in our country even the most incorrigible contradictions and confrontations."
Evaluating the situation in the east of Ukraine, the hierarch said: "A war is going on there in which on the one side and on the other Ukrainians are perishing. If residents of our country die from a bullet, that means that brother is killing brother, and this is unacceptable under any conditions. It is necessary to reject emotion and to learn how to accept the bitter truth and listen to one another. And of course to use even the slightest chance for a peaceful solution of the conflict."
Answering next the question whether the UPTs is patriotic, its primate noted that it "simply quietly and without fanfare continues to work for the good of its motherland."
At the end of the interview Metropolitan Onufrey summed up: "We want to preserve the unity of the country and people. . . . The war will end sooner or later. And in order that the country will be able to survive its consequences without extreme fluctuations it is now necessary to try to connect people who are on opposite sides of the dividing lines with invisible threads of love and mutual support. Only in this way can we preserve our unity. The unity of the nation and country. This is where I see the manifestation of genuine patriotism. . . . That people of the same blood, and often even of the same faith, not kill one another but instead, shoulder to shoulder, build a strong and prosperous Ukraine."
We recall that the concept of the Russian World was introduced at the official level of church support by Patriarch Kirill. Immediately after election as head of the RPTs, he began popularizing the doctrine of the Russian World, which provides for a "special" leading role of the Russian people, Russian language, and Russian national values in the entire postsoviet space. This was declared by the ideologues of the Russian World: Patriarch Kirill in a report on 3 November 2009 at the Third Assembly of the Russian World and the vice-chairman of OVTsS of the Moscow patriarchate, Hegumen Filipp, in a report on 17 June 2010 in the Center of Social Conservative Policy in Moscow before an audience of the project School of Russian Politics. The geography of the Russian World, proposed in 2012 by Patriarch Kirill, incorporates the countries of the former Soviet Union: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and "other countries."
In January 2014 the head of the synod's Department for Relations of Church and Society of the Moscow patriarchate, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, guided by the ideas of the Russian World, called Russia and its allies to intervene in the affairs of Ukraine. (tr. by PDS, posted 22 July 2015)
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