UGCC responds to UOC-MP on Odessa church building

See this story for some background. "In Odesa, where the vast majority of the residents are believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, there is such a small number of Greek Catholics that there is no need to build not only a cathedral but even a prayer house for the Uniates," stated Metropolitan Ahafanhel (Savin) of Odesa and Izmail of the UOC.

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(RISU) - The Chancellor of the Odesa-Crimean Exarchate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Fr. Volodymyr Zhdan stressed that that Church has existed in the Odesa Region since the beginning of the 18th c. and, therefore, any talks of proselytism of Greek Catholics is out of the question. He made this statement as he commented on accusations brought forward by the press-service of the Odesa Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, according to which the construction of a Greek Catholic church building in Odesa was called inexpedient and the pastoral activity of UGCC in Odesa was called expansion and proselytism.

« Before the forced liquidation of the Union by Empress Catherine II in the end of the 18th century, there were more Greek Catholic Churches in the Odesa Region than the Orthodox ones, which is testified by numerous archive documents. Therefore, we have not come here to someone else’s territory but returned to the places where our parents lived,” stressed Fr. Volodymyr.

According to the Greek Catholic priest, the Union was accepted in the 16th century by the whole Ukrainian Church headed by the Metropolitan of Kyiv, that is all the Right-bank Ukraine, including the Odesa Region was uniate. “Greek Catholicism is the faith of our ancestors, the faith of the Kyivan Rus. The orthodox of the Moscow Patriarchate are our nearest brethren as Moscow received the faith from Kyiv,” stressed Fr. Volodymyr.

According to the press-service of UGCC in Odesa, one should not forget historic facts indicating that UGCC was pushed out to the west of Dnieper only due to the persecutions of the Russian authorities. In the 20th century, thanks to the efforts of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, UGCC began to return to the Great Ukraine, and in 1946, Stalin by force annexed that Church to the Moscow Patriarchate. The authorities passed the Greek Catholic Churches to the Russian Orthodox Church or closed them down and the Greek Catholic structures went underground. UGCC lived in the underground for over 40 years.

“In 1989, UGCC came out fro the underground and the Ukrainian authorities gave them back a large part of the churches, which was viewed by representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate as the “defeat of Orthodoxy,” reads the statement.

The statement also says that today, parishes of UGCC function all over Ukraine. There are about twenty of them in the Odesa Region.