Start of Christmas celebrations in St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv on January 6th
Image: Reuters
Two warring orthodox churches are fighting in Kyiv for the Cave Monastery, the most important monastery in the country. And believers are at odds over when to celebrate Christmas.
Dhe Christmas festival of the three Eastern Churches in Ukraine, i.e. the two rival Orthodox Churches and the Greek Catholic Church subordinate to Rome, is this Saturday marked by war. This Saturday is marked by war. War damage was not only registered at 270 religious sites up to July alone. In the last few days, a heated argument has broken out over which Orthodox are allowed to celebrate the service in the cathedral of the medieval Kiev Pechersk Lavra on Saturday. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OKU), which was founded in 2019 with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I and sees itself as a new “national church”, had applied at short notice to be allowed to celebrate there.
The Ministry of Culture, which manages this part of the monastery, quickly gave her approval. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), based in another part of the spacious monastery, opposed this: It was an “attempt at a violent takeover”. For a long time, the UOC was subordinate to the Orthodox Patriarchate in Moscow and is considered relatively pro-Russian, even though it distanced itself from it in May and condemned the war.
