On its surface, the debacle gripping the Orthodox Christian world between the Patriarchate in Constantinople and the Moscow Patriarchate in Russia seems to be a territorial dispute over who has control over the Orthodox faithful in Ukraine.
In reality, the Moscow Patriarchate is standing against Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople giving millions of Ukrainian Orthodox faithful over to an unrecognized and out of communion apostate political church. Not just any old apostate church mind you, but shortly after its founding this one blessed and consecrated its members that committed the worst atrocities of WWII and all the way through the 1950's until the OUN was finally defeated in Ukraine.
Now, this apostate church wants to control the religious life of the same people it condemned to torture, starvation, and murder. Let that sink in and consider the facts.
The Orthodox Church (Prava Slava) traces its lineage through bishops back through at least one of the original 12 Apostles to Jesus Christ. Any church claiming the Orthodox faith must be able to do the same to have fellowship in the faith.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church was started in the 1920's to glorify the death of Nazi heroes and prepare the way for more. The only thing it was concerned about was the creation of a Ukrainian state. Its adherents manned the levers at the death camps and were considered overzealously cruel by the German Nazis.
The Ukrainian nationalists which fathered the Ukrainian nationalist Orthodoxy saw religion as the perfect political vehicle to manipulate the masses. They took religious absolutism and channeled it into politics.
The religions of Ukrainian nationalism are real Christian religions recast as nationalist politics. These changes remade good into evil. Faithfulness and patriotism to your country become unquestioning robotic murder under nationalism. Concepts like love are turned into degeneracy because you are expected to spy on the people you love and turn them over to the state when they disagree.
This philosophy continues today and a bishop of the church of Jesus Christ (Orthodox), considered a first among equals, is trying to give control and responsibility of another Bishop's flock to a political religion that gave up ties to Jesus Christ, His apostles, and the church in 1993.
A Brief History of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church- KyivLet's start at the end. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev is a post-1991 import from the USA and Canada. Before 1991, it existed in what is now Ukraine for a couple of years during the early 1920's and again when Hitler's forces occupied the Eastern European region.
The third was to make Ukrainian nationalism the only ideal worth dying for. For Ukrainian nationalists, they did that in spades.
Religious and political nationalism was the most impressive and lasting development of the Hapsburg empire (Holy Roman Empire). They did this to keep their border countries from joining the Romanov's Russian empire. After 1917 it kept them from joining the Soviet Union. The Austro-Hungarian empire designed nationalist ideologies for all their border holdings and paid special attention to the religion.
Until the end of WWI, Vienna was the seat of the Hapsburg's Holy Roman Empire. They knew a little bit about redesigning religion to serve the empire's needs and they may have lost the war but the ramifications of what they did are still reverberating today in Eastern Europe and the Levant.
Their great contribution to world history is two-tier nationalisms. Nazi (nationalist) ideologies and political religion go with all their former holdings today in Central and Eastern Europe.
The way it works is "Each citizen's identity had to wrap around the exceptionalism as defined by the leaders of their country. Each citizen was first and foremost entirely devoted to the nation, demonstrated by national sacrifice or heroism. To be entirely devoted to nation involved an almost cultic devotion to the Emperor and the Empire that the nation was part of and belonged to and Galician Ukraine became the Austro-Hungarian Empire's poster child."- Ukraine | Why Bandera Have the Largest Geo-Political Voice in EU
According to OUNb Ukrainian Diaspora sources; Ukrainian Nationalist (nazi) Orthodox priests went through the different countries that would eventually make up Ukraine in the 1920s and preached a gospel of nationalism. This was how Nazi thought gained the ground it did across central and eastern Europe. These regions gave backing to the rise of Adolf Hitler's 3rd Reich.
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