UOC: A poor country is fed with promises that if there is a SLOC - the problems will disappear

Against the background of military actions, the Ukrainian authorities do not want to solve economic problems and tell people that everything "will be like in Europe," and if there is a Single Local Orthodox Church (SLOC,) all problems will go away, which leads to the discrimination of the UOC. This was told by Metropolitan of Zaporozhye and Melitopol Luke in his report at the international conference in Patra (Greece), reports the press service of Zaporozhye eparchy of the UOC.

According to the hierarch, after the Revolution of Dignity of 2014, the authorities began "to build relations with the Church in line with European values that were declared as goal-setting in this revolution" and as a result "a new model of church-state relations arose, with totalitarian destructive elements, significantly worse even than in the segregation model of relations with the Church in the USSR."

Vladyka gives a definition of this type of relationship – "identification-discriminatory", that is, implying "the merging of the state with a certain religious and political structure, which is assigned the role of an ideologically and politically biased religion."

In his opinion, this has led to the emergence of centrifugal tendencies in the regions of Ukraine. "But with skillful and wise respect for local traditions, careful and tactful attitude to people's memory, they can be minimized. However, instead, the power-holders began actively to impose only one, local Western Ukrainian ideology as a nation-wide ideology, based on the principles of the union and nationalism, with its worldview that “embarrasses those people who do not share this ideology," explained Metropolitan Luke.