The Patriarchate commented on the Ukrainian bill to ban the Russian Orthodox Church

The bill to ban the ROC and religious organizations that are part of it or canonically subordinate to it speaks of hatred for Orthodoxy. So RIA Novosti commented on the situation adviser to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, Archpriest Nikolai Balashov.

The bill was published on the website of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Among other things, it stipulates that a religious organization can use the word “Orthodox” in its name only if it is subordinate to the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine”. The Russian Orthodox Church, in an explanatory note to the document, was accused of spreading the ideology of the “Russian world” on the territory of Ukraine, as well as using the status “for anti-Ukrainian subversive activities and a split among the Orthodox population of Ukraine.”

Adviser to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, Archpriest Nikolai Balashov, noted that such bills are an attempt at gross interference by the secular state in religious life, violating the rights of citizens to freedom of conscience and violating the Constitution. “It’s hard to say what is more here – hatred for Orthodoxy as such, a desire to further inflame civil confrontation in one’s own country, or simply a desire to get more mentions in the media and increase one’s personal political rating,” Balashov stressed.

In 2018, on the initiative of Petro Poroshenko, the “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” was created in Ukraine as a counterbalance to the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 2019, the OCU was granted a “tomos of autocephaly” by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. At the same time, the OCU is subordinate to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and most of the 15 local churches in the world refuse it the title of canonical.