ORTHODOXIA.INFO | Andreas Loudaros Metropolitan Oleksandr Drabinko, a well-known hierarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate and former secretary to Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan of blessed memory, has today announced that he considers himself a cleric of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
In an interview with a private online news agency, Metropolitan Oleksandr of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky stated that, “Following the recent meeting of the Constantinople Patriarchate’s Synod, the transfer of the Kyiv Metropolia to Moscow was annulled. Thus, going forward, we can consider the territory of Ukraine to be the territory of this restored Metropolia of the Constantinople Patriarchate. More specifically, from that point [when Constantinople made this decision] onward, we are, today, clerics of the Constantinople Church.”
In a recent article of his published on orthodoxia.info, Metropolitan Oleksandr had stressed that, “Cessation of ties for reasons which do not affect dogma is entirely unacceptable. Furthermore, this can lead to destructive changes in the ecclesiastical consciousness.”
It is worth noting that on October 11 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate nullified the legal validity of the letter written in 1686 according to which the patriarch of Moscow was granted the right to ordain the metropolitan of Kyiv. The Synod also announced the re-establishment of Constantinople’s stavropegion in Kyiv and the restoration of Ukraine’s schismatics to canonical status.
Translation by Evangelos Nicolaidis
