Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has said that the country needs a unified Ukrainian Orthodox church, but the state will not intervene and put pressure on the Church in this matter.
“I, as president and head of state, assure you that the government will not resort to any forceful steps and will put no pressure. We need to guard religious peace as the apple of our eye,” he said at a meeting of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations on Saint Volodymyr Hill in Kyiv.
Poroshenko stressed that overcoming the split in Ukrainian Orthodoxy should be a matter primarily for believers.
“The authorities are glad that progress emerges in uniting processes, just as they get upset when the small ambitions of some church hierarchs separate us all from the great purpose,” Poroshenko said. “Today we are closer to it [the goal] than yesterday and the certain unconventionality of our situation requires searching for unconventional solutions,” the president said.
Lack of organized unity should not be an obstacle to dialogue and mutual understanding “especially amid the national war the Ukrainian people are waging,” Poroshenko said.
“This is the tradition of Orthodox ecumene – almost every independent Orthodox state has independent autocephalous church. Let’s look at the map alphabetically: Bulgaria and Georgia, Greece and Cyprus, Romania and Serbia. Why is Ukraine different? Why don’t we become an exception from this rule?” Poroshenko said.
