EDITOR’S NOTE (Nick Stamatakis). Our title says it all. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), an autonomous Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, was banned after the adoption of the infamous law 8371 from Verkhovna Rada, the country’s parliament. We are talking about the Church that is followed by 70% of the Ukrainian Orthodox. All masks are now off and the true game of the globalists and the Ukro-nazis is transparent for all to see. The central goal has been, since the beginning, Orthodoxy, the backbone of the Russian culture. Without Orthodoxy, there is no Russia. This is why Mike Pompeo (as head of the State Dept or the CIA), in his many visits with Pat. Bartholomew in Constantinople NEVER cared to help restore the Halki Seminary or help the Patriarchate in any other way. His only concern was using Bartholomew and Greek Orthodoxy against the Russian Orthodoxy. H allegedly blackmailed Bartholomew and achieved the Ukrainian “Cacocephaly” which led to the Schism in Orthodoxy (interruption of communion by Moscow with those who accepted the “Cacocephaly” .)
Many have argued that the West’s effort was not new, but it was also evident in Western bankers financing Lenin and Trotsky to install Communism in Moscow and later, when the Western “banksters” financed Hitler to attack Russia. We will try to shed light on those issues at a later point as they reveal the true meaning of today’s events.
But in general, this is one more sign of panic and desperation by the defeated Ukrainians and their Western backers. We see the same desperation in Ukrainian attacks on nuclear power plans in Kursk and Zaporizhia – and we are praying to God to save humanity from these Ukronazi monsters. As Russian forces are now advancing faster to the west, it is now a matter of time before they will overrun the collapsing shadow of a (formerly formidable) Ukrainian Army, and they will occupy most of what is now called Ukraine. Then, the schismatic Metropolitan Epiphany will achieve his proper title (given by Helleniscope 2 years ago): EPIPHANY OF NO UKRAINE!!
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Verkhovna Rada adopts Bill No. 8371 banning the UOC
MPs adopted in the first reading of Draft Law № 8371, providing for the ban of the UOC.
On August 20, 2024, the Verkhovna Rada adopted in full the draft law No. 8371 “On the Protection of the Constitutional Order in the Sphere of Religious Organizations”, aimed at banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
The decision was supported by 265 members of Parliament, with 29 voting against and 4 abstaining. In the “Servant of the People” faction, 173 MPs voted in favor of the law, “European Solidarity” gave 25 votes, “Batkivschyna” (“Fatherland”) – 17, “Platform for Life and Peace” – 1, “For the Future” – 9, “Holos” (“Voice”) – 18, “Dovira” (“Trust”) – 11, and “Restoration of Ukraine” – 0. Independent MPs contributed 11 votes.
The law will come into force 30 days after its publication, except for one provision – UOC communities will have 9 months to sever ties with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC).
On July 23, MPs blocked the podium of the Verkhovna Rada due to the refusal to consider the bill banning the UOC, thereby disrupting the plenary session.
On August 16, the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy approved amendments to Bill No. 8371 and recommended that Parliament adopt it in the second reading and in full.
The All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, without the participation of UOC representatives, stated on August 17 that it supports the legislative initiative to ban religious organizations associated with the ROC in Ukraine.
As previously reported by the Union of Orthodox Journalists, on August 15, President Zelensky urged the Rada to convene and resolve the issue of “spiritual independence”.
Well shall see if the spiritual death of Ukraine will precede the physical death of Ukraine.
Hopefully the other Patriarchs speak out against this.
This will backfire in their faces. Stupidity in its highest form.
Nick.
Your report on the banning of the UOC is one sided. We, Greeks know very well how nationalistic the Orthodox church can be. Anyone who knows Greece’s history, the Bulgarian exarchate egged on and participated in treasonous activities against Greek citizens, from the 1860’s to the 1960’s. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were executed, with the Bulgarian church’s blessing, or were forcibly Bulgarized or their property was confiscated and were forced to flee. To be totally fair, the GO, church also participated in ethnic cleansing. Not at the Bulgarian level, but it was pretty bad.
The UOC ban was approved by Ukraine’s parliament. They feel that the Russian affiliated church, even though the UOC denies it, is a fifth column. That accusation could very well be true. We are not in Ukraine. Our sons are not in the front lines. We haven’t lost over a quarter of a million of our countrymen in a two and a half year unjust war. Our country has not been invaded by an adversary that wants us to become Russian again. Our country has not been devastated. Who are we to say any different than what Ukrainians themselves are saying.?
Bob, you are still, after so many posts and explanations, unable to conceive basic facts. The aggressor in the war in Ukraine was the West. Do you realize that Angela Merkel confessed that the Minsk agreements were fake because “the West needed time to arm Ukraine”? Sorry but I will not allow you to post anything else on Ukraine if you ignore such basic facts. We don’t have time for low level argumentation.
Bob,
In a prior thread, many months ago, you became extremely passionate about the need to keep the State out of Church affairs, and vice versa. I remember that thread.
It appears you are now favoring the idea that a “democratic” State can arbitrarily “ban” a Church that at least half the population of a country involved in an obvious civil war (fighting and religious persecutions started in 2014 following the coup backed by Victoria Nuland & team before it magnified into an expanded proxy war 8 years later) identifies with, even though you know very well that the representatives in that Kiev Parliament who participated in “the vote” do not contain any real “representatives from the East of the Dnieper river” right now…is that really “the voice of the Ukrainians”?
Is that the type of “democracy” that our taxes have been wasted on the past few years? Do you feel the same way about the Kiev Caves takeover? Would you like it if Democrats were “banned” from having an voice in Congress/Senate voting procedures just because Republicans happen to gain control of those buildings? That’s hypocrisy, or more accurately, your rhetoric is fully aligned with the 500 year old Vatican Uniate doctrine for Ukraine with such statements like you just made above. Maybe the Vatican will reward you with a medal of honor for such rhetoric one day for your assistance with their 500 year old cause (800 years if you include the 4th Crusade and its aftermath). Congratulations. Και εις ανωτερα, as they say.
Instead, what you (and everyone else here) should be asking, is why in 2018 all of a sudden Patriarch Bartholomew reversed his position that for 27 years prior he was signing with his name on publicly available documents where he was clearly agreeing with Moscow that
a) the Church that the Ukranian parliament is now trying to ban was the Canonical Church in the Ukraine
b) Philaret (succeeded by his disciple Epiphanios) was an illegitimate, defrocked clergyman
c) Kiev was acknowledged as the jurisdiction of Moscow, and not Constantinople’s.
Look it up…it’s true….don’t just read about Bulgarian history…read on Bartholomew’s history of signatures, and his destructive “flip-flop”, too.
You can do better than that, man…you’re a very capable intellectual…consistency in word and thought is always a better option than devolving into the “Greek kafeneio syndrome”, where 2 Greeks are frequently observed producing 3 opinions… “even if person A agrees with person B, person A will insist on the opposite position because person B “dared” to voice the opinion first, and that can’t be allowed in front of the village that is watching the debate…”
Be consistent…unless you suddenly changed your opinion about your beliefs in the separation of Church and State’s obligations and roles, and wish to go back to that earlier thread and reverse your opinion there…
Mark
Why do you always have to spin your replies and add so much fluff, that it totally veers from the original story. I also remember a reader just last week, that wanted a yes or no answer from you and you wrote something like 10 paragraphs.
Telling me that the Vatican is going to award me a medal is not only nonsense, it also condemns the rest of your argument as useless. My suspicion is that you are attempting to impress readers with your supposed knowledge of ecclesiastical history and what you’re actually doing is applying obscure historical events to totally unrelated subjects.
As far as Ukraine and their church, I already explained how the Orthodox church is very nationalistic. When Moscow’s Kyril blessed the Russian troops, as if they were going to a just war and when Greece was fighting the Bulgarian comitatjides, in Macedonia who were allied with the Bulgarian exarchate and when the Bulgarian priests were taking photos, in front of executed Greeks, with the Bulgarian “conquerors” of Thrace, during WWII, what does all that mean? That Greece should have given free reign to Bulgarian Orthodox? Why should Ukraine treat the Russian church as anything other than a fifth column?
Besides, who are you or me, to second guess the Ukrainians? We dont have skin in the game. Let them fight their war for survival as they see fit.
Apples are not Oranges, Bob. Even if you try and paint them Orange.
It is historically true that we can refer to the “Skopians” as Bulgarians. That’s a Bulgarian dialect that they speak, that’s what they identified as in the Balkan Wars.
You correctly said that the Bulgarians invaded and occupied Thrace, Kavala, and even Thessaloniki in WW2, allied with Germany for the 2nd time in 2 world wars. However the population exchanges of the Balkan wars had long preceded WW2, the Bulgarian populations had mostly left Greek territory, so the Bulgarian invasion in WW2 was into a territory with pretty much a homogeneous Greek population (including Language). This is NOT the case in the territory that they call Ukraine today.
In the Ukraine, there survives a clear religious / cultural demographic divide, and if you want to examine it from a DNA perspective, you will find German, Polish, and Russian DNA for the most part. Some have historically been aligned with Moscow, others aligned with the Nazis and also committed unspeakable atrocities in WW2. Their decendants are proudly wearing those Nazi symbols and have been brutally attacking pro-Moscow populations, churches, clergy, etc since the 2014 coup. So who exactly are the “Ukrainians” here?
There was really never a Ukrainian “ethnicity” in centuries past, based on our understanding of “ethnicity”. Think of Belgium (Flemish vs. French), Spain(Catalonia, Basques, etc). Ukraine is not homogenous either. The religious lines in the Ukraine were always clear…the seeds of division were planted by the Vatican Uniates in the 1600s and 1700s, with the large Uniate invasions from Prussia and Poland, altering the percentages and homogeneity of the original population, and deceiving Orthodox populations by dressing their clergy as Orthodox, but aligning with the Vatican especially in the regions near and to the West of Kiev (they did the same in Sicily and devoured the Orthodox refugees from Constantinople)….so today, if you look at this “religious mess” closely, east of the Dnieper river, it was populated by people who felt aligned with the Moscow Patriarchate, and West of the Dnieper river, there was a large population that aligned with the Uniate churches aligned with the Vatican, and in recent years the Filaret self-proclaimed patriarchate that eventually and tragically Bartholomew gave a Tomos to in 2018, causing schism across Orthodoxy.
As a quick reminder to illustrate that we are not talking about a “homogeneous population”, remember the year 2013-2014, just before the West-supported coup in Kiev…how is it possible that there was a government elected by “the people” that happened to be “pro-Moscow”? A LARGE PORTION OF THE COUNTRY WAS PRO MOSCOW.
That’s the point…the 2014 coup started a civil war. The West wanted the Ukraine to enter NATO by hook or by crook, no matter what the body count would be in the regions that were “resisting” this (Donbass, etc)…
So let’s not compare apples to oranges, and I won’t have to respond with “10 paragraphs”… How can you possibly say “second guess the Ukrainians” when you know that the East population of that “country” isn’t even allowed to vote in this parliament these days…they’ve been banned. Who are these “Ukrainians”, then, when only one half of the population has a voice in Parliament these days? How can you ignore the fact that an estimated 70% of the 2014 Ukrainian population that claimed to be Orthodox was under Onouphrios, and constituted almost half of the entire population of that country (when you factor the Vatican sects)? Is it that simple to “ban” so many millions, burn their churches, kill their priests, and then pass a law that you claim we shouldn’t “second guess”?
I repeat my earlier words. You are a very capable intellectual. However, you are either intentionally ignoring certain historical facts here, or you don’t care to investigate them sufficiently. Either way, your definition of what constitutes a “Ukrainian” is not correct, given the history of the matter, as well as the facts on the ground.
I AM Ukrainian. I’m also a priestmonk, formerly married, with adult children and grandchildren. I support the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox church headed by Metropolitan Onufry. For years I have said,”I will be Russian OR Ukrainian. but I will never be Soviet.” Bottom line: I have relatives on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia border whom I have never met. My late father left Russia in the last years of Tsar Nicholas’s reign. I do have skin in the game. I’m not unsympathetic to the schismatics, if Metropolitan Epiphany gets out of line, his globalist handlers will probably take him out and blame it on Putin.
As a monastic, I would prefer to concentrate on the salvation of my soul. But I’m also a parish priest and I have grandchildren whom I don’t want to see grow up to become cannon fodder on some future conflict against a homeland which has not attacked our nation. Can any of you parents and grandparents out there blame me?
In this country, even during the height of the Cold War, churches belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate were allowed to function freely in this country. Bear in mind that this was when the Soviet Union really was the evil empire, and the MP was highly infiltrated by the Communists. Now Communism has fallen and the church in Russia has revived and continues to expand. One need not be a follower of Putin (I’m a monarchist myself) to acknowledge this. Furthermore, clergy of both ROCOR and the OCA have visited Ukraine and seen how church life is in the canonical church. Their testimony is good enough for me.
So yes, I’m Ukrainian. I enjoy speaking Ukrainian, which I speak along with Russian and Slovak. My parish is English speaking, and I rarely get to practice these languages anymore. Those parishioners who are old boomers like me, tend to believe the mainstream media about the Ukraine situation. Those in their fifties and younger, not so much. I tell everyone that I never push politics in church. I would venture to say that virtually every one of my parishioners voted for Trump. If anyone didn’t, he or she has not said anything. I also tell them that I’m a monarchist. Since no Orthodox monarchy is in power anywhere in the world, I can hardly be accused of being a shill for this or that political leader.
Hey Bobbi .. so you support the Banning of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church because they are affiliated with Russia …which now legitimizes the arrest of Jewish Rabbi’s and Evangelical ministers and banning of their religion for being Israeli and US . loyalist thruout Europe , Middle East , Asia, and latin America ! Furthermore , U.S evangelical Pastors in Turkey have been arrested for colluding in being Safe havens for Terrorist organization operating in Syria by Turkey , and sentenced to long jail sentences in which the State department interceded an impose Economic Sanctions on Turkey to get them released !
Headlines: Zelensky gave initial order for Nord Stream attack – WSJ
Headlines: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate and Republican House committee passed a bill on Wednesday to slap sanctions on companies and individuals involved in building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany t
Only members of Criminal enterprises ..Republican and democratic parties can successfully violate Domestic , International , UN Charter laws and Nuremburg Tribunal laws and codes with the consent and cooperation of the FBI, law enforcement agencies , and Justice Department of America .
“All War crimes , Crimes against Humanity, genocide , ethnic and religious cleansing , Religious Freedoms and Human rights violation and Act of Terrorism and war by the Neo Nazi Jewish Zionist Regimes of Ukraine and Israel, make Neo Nazi Zionist Joe Biden and regime , Republican House leader Mike Johnson … Democratic Senate leader Chuck Shumer , and members of the Republican and Democratic ruling parties , like Congressman Tom Kean Jr. and Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey of accessories to all their crimes in aiding and abetting the commission of crimes in funding, arming, and violating the first amendment rights of US citizens , as well as Ukrainian and Palestinian Orthodox citizens!
Only white supremacist Fascist think everyone is inferior and stupid ..not to understand that both the Republican and Democratic ruling parties are “Criminal enterprises” who use capitalism and fear to rule the world! And if you haven’t noticed have been doing this for decades !