The Kyiv Patriarchate is a national church that its head, Patriarch Filaret, calls “genuinely Ukrainian” — the protector of the national heritage. Other Orthodox churches around the world refuse to recognise it, although, according to surveys, it enjoys considerable support from Ukrainian society. The dead child had been baptised into this church.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a completely different matter. Its leadership seems condemned to spend each day reconciling the irreconcilable. On the one hand, there’s its loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate, and on the other its loyalty to the Ukrainian society, which has been dragged into an armed conflict known unofficially as the “Ukrainian-Russian war”. It was a priest of this church who refused to read the funeral service to the boy in Zaporizhzhya — just because the child had been baptised in a church belonging to the Kyiv Patriarchate. [...]
Since 2014 the UOC’s public face has been firmly associated with Russia and Russian politics — because that is how it’s presented to the public. For example, despite the fact that its official name is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Ukrainian media invariably refer to it as “the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine” or the “Russian Orthodox Church”. This strategy, whether by accident or design, neatly fits the image of an enemy. Ordinary Ukrainians who don’t go to church or care about religious minutiae will watch news about the war with Russia on TV and quite reasonably ask themselves what the Russian Orthodox Church is doing in their country. [...]
Yet this attempt to override the national just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because the UOC is promoting as un-national, supra-national, something that is in fact only too national, or, to put it bluntly, Russian. Fraternal peoples, the “reunification of Ukraine and Russia” — these are all Soviet clichés that will sooner or later lead seminary students, or indeed ordinary believers, to ask the simple question: if we are brothers, if we profess a common faith, then why is there a border between us? In their most radical variations, these ideas relate to the concept of a “Russian World” or “Holy Rus”, as it was called a few years ago when Moscow Patriarch Kirill was actively promoting the idea. This is why the patriotically-minded part of the Ukrainian population sees UOC as an apostle of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
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