wooWhile the Russian army is currently raging and advancing from village to village in eastern Ukraine, it seems that Russian Orthodoxy should church (ROK) have just suffered a massive defeat. Last Friday, a national council of bishops, priests, monks and laymen declared the “full autonomy and independence” of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which has been under the Moscow Patriarchate as an autonomous church since 1990. For this purpose, it has been decided to “relevant additions and changes to the Statute” of the UOK.

The importance of this assembly and its resolution can already be seen from the fact that the last National Council meeting of the UOC took place more than ten years ago, in July 2011. Incidentally, the current council took place exactly thirty years after the Kharkiv Synod of bishops, which declared the then Kyiv Metropolitan Philaret deposed because he, along with other Ukrainian bishops, had dared to ask the Moscow Patriarch for a prize. Ecclesiastical Freedom, November 1991, “Autocephaly”. Exactly three decades later, UOK finds independence Moscow Explained.