The Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) sent to the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko calling to stop the pressure on believers and political manipulation in religious matters.
"We ask you As the guarantor of the Constitution to make the necessary efforts to stop attempts at the state level to apply the issues of religion and religious choice of the people of Ukraine in political manipulation and the settling of scores between political opponents. Today in our country have become commonplace the insults, threats and calls for discrimination regarding million believers of our Church ", - the news Agency quotes an open letter to Poroshenko.
the Synod stressed that no single incident associated with the pressure on the parishioners of the UOC-MP, did not acquire legal needs assessment of state agencies." The status quo forces to talk about the emergence of disturbing trends in Church - state relations. The same opinion is sound and in reports of many international organizations that monitor the observance of rights and freedoms, such as the OSCE and the UN, " ? the statement reads. A similar example of pressure, the Holy Synod considers the attempt to prosecute under the criminal code of the Deputy of the Verkhovna Rada from the "Opposition bloc" and patron of the UOC-MP Vadim Novinsky, which the Prosecutor General's office of Ukraine suspected of abuse of power and complicity in kidnapping in 2013, Archbishop Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky and Alexander Vishnevetsky (Alexander drabinko). For reviews of Church society "has consciously become an instrument of political struggle, ignoring morality" and deliberately spreading " unsubstantiated unverified information, and libel ". Ukraine currently operates the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is a self-governing Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. The country also has two not recognized by the international Orthodox Church structure ? of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Over the past period of time, the Kyivan Patriarchate is pursuing an extremely aggressive policy against parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, the system received the seizure of the temples of the UOC-MP, the Ukrainian authorities in every possible way create obstacles to the development of the Church. According to the UOC-MP for the last 2 years she lost 40 of the temples, which was subordinated to the Kyiv Patriarchate. As reported before, the UOC-MP, on the night of 7 November, unidentified, burned in the night of Monday the temple in honor of saints Cyril and Methodius in Pavlograd Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine. 12 Sep radical inhabitants of the village of Borova, Kiev region destroyed a newly built Church of the UOC-MP. And at the end of the summer unidentified robbed two temples of the UOC-MP in Zdolbunovskaya district, Rivne region of Ukraine.

sections: Politics