President Volodymyr Zelensky’s weekly address on Sunday evening, March 12, put the supposed defense of Ukrainian “spirituality” as a matter of expunging the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) from its central site of the last 972 years, the famous Pechersk Lavra, or “Monastery of the Caves.”
In December, Zelensky had decreed a commission to look into the UOC. On March 10, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, acting upon the commission’s call to expel the monastery, ordered that the monks vacate by March 29. The next day, on March 11, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church called upon religious and other leaders of the world to weigh in. He sent letters to the UN, Pope Francis of Rome, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Coptic Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, the heads of various Orthodox churches, and others, urging them to “make every possible effort to prevent the forced closure of the monastery, which will lead to a violation of the rights of millions of Ukrainian Orthodox faithful.” The UOC has been historically the largest church by far in Ukraine, though, as a reminder of a thousand-year history that the Maidan revolutionaries would prefer to forget, they have effectively become an enemy of the state since the 2014 coup.
Kirill stated: “Throughout the thousand-year history of the monastery, it has repeatedly suffered from raids, foreign conquests and outright persecution of Christians. But only during the reign of militant atheists in the 20th century were the monks of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra expelled from the monastery.” That is, Kiev’s only comrades-in-arms in such actions over the last one thousand years were the communists of the Soviet Union.
Zelensky’s national address came the next day: “This week there is also a move to strengthen our spiritual independence. We will not allow the terrorist state any opportunity to manipulate the spirituality of our people, to destroy our holy sites – our Lavras – or to steal valuables from them.” Expelling the monks is “completely legal,” he asserted.
Yesterday, the abbot of the monastery declared that the order was in fact not legal, and that the monks would “not carry out the order” to leave. One might think that the Kiev regime would not physically manhandle monks in a monastery, but both the last year of insinuations, raids, and arrests, and the tone of Zelensky’s national announcement Sunday, suggest otherwise.
