Religious strife in Ukraine continues among competing Orthodox Churches (03/23/97)

Religious strife in Ukraine continues among competing Orthodox Churches

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) continues to disintegrate amid another flare-up of inter-Church strife in Ukraine. The latest scandal involves the desertion of a leading bishop and the takeover of the UAOC offices by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP).

At the beginning of March, Bishop Ioan (Boichuk), who had assumed the day-to-day administration of the UAOC after a synod of bishops dismissed Patriarch Dymytrii amid charges of fraud and embezzlement on November 19, 1996, quietly aligned himself with the UOC-KP. Along with him went the documents of the UAOC, its property and the Church chancery located on the grounds of St. Mykhailo Sobor.

On March 9 seminarians of the Kyiv Spiritual Seminary of the UOC-KP entered the chancery of the UAOC and forcibly removed the six people inside, including Patriarch Dymytrii, Bishop Makarii and four others. The evicted group tried to re-enter the building amid a scuffle, were momentarily successful, but were thrown out again.

As the six awaited reinforcements in the form of UAOC faithful, the militia, armed with automatic weapons, arrived and restored calm. They refused to allow the patriarch to enter the building, claiming that they were there to restore order and not to right wrongs, according to Oleh Kalynychenko, an assistant to Patriarch Dymytrii.

Bishop Ioan is said to have moved to the UOC-KP under the jurisdiction of Patriarch Filaret - because of his disenchantment with the various financial fiascoes that have plagued the Church. He has refused public comment. Bishop Ioan was named bishop of Ivano-Frankivsk on March 7 by Patriarch Filaret.

On December 4, 1996, Bishop Ioan had told The Weekly that the UAOC bishops who had been dismissed, including Patriarch Dymytrii and Bishop Ihor (Isichenko) of the Kharkiv-Poltava Eparchy, had established organizations to launder money through the Church. Recently he accused Archbishop Mykhail (Dutkevych) of Bila Tserkva, who had remained with Bishop Ioan and Metropolitan Vasilii (appointed locum tenens by the synod after the patriarch's expulsion), of running a series of commercial enterprises at the UAOC offices.

One of the seminarians now ensconced in the chancery building said that, of the 26 rooms in the chancery, only four looked as if they were used for Church business when the seminarians took control of the building on March 12. He said the seminarians had a legal right to the building by a government document from 1991 by which the building was to have been turned into a seminary (at that time the UAOC and the UOC-KP were still one Church).

Bishop Ihor of Kharkiv told The Weekly on March 17 that he had long suspected Archbishop Mykhail was involved in financial improprieties, and that it seems the archbishop is a culprit in the sordid affairs of the Church. "When we entered the chancery back in November after the renegade bishops had taken the chancery from the patriarch, we found documents that were forged by Mykhail and papers to which he fraudulently applied the seal of the patriarch," said Bishop Ihor. The archbishop, ironically, was the person who convened the Synod of Bishops at which Patriarch Dymytrii and Bishop Ihor were dismissed. Archbishop Mykhail is under investigation by the Procurator General's Office of Ukraine, as are Patriarch Dymytrii and Bishop Ihor.

However, Bishop Ihor said that neither he nor the patriarch would take responsibility for the commercial use of the offices because Bishop Ioan had controlled what went on inside the chancery for the last four months. No charges have been leveled at any of the clergy involved.

At least one UAOC adherent, who attended at a press conference in the chancery yard on March 13, during which Patriarch Dymytrii spoke to the press as seminarians from the UOC-KP gazed from inside the building through iron door-grates, believes the whole matter is a conspiracy between Bishop Ioan and Patriarch Filaret to take over the UAOC.

Yevhenia Kozak, a member of the UAOC parish of Ss. Borys and Hlib, said Bishop Ioan left the UOC-KP to rejoin the UAOC in order to instill dissension and revolt. "My feeling is that Filaret sent Ioan here to cause disruption and to take property," she said.

A quick look at the resumé of Bishop Ioan shows a person who has jumped among the Churches of Ukraine, showing little loyalty and all the while rising quickly through the ranks.

Although born into a Greek-Catholic family in Ivano-Frankivsk, Vasyl Boichuk (Bishop Ioan), was ordained a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1990 he went over to the UAOC, as did the majority of parishes of the Ivano-Frankivsk region. He jumped ship there to join the newly created UOC-KP in 1992, where he stayed until July 1995. After Patriarch Filaret became primate of the UOC-KP following the debacle surrounding the burial of Patriarch Volodymyr Romaniuk, the Rev. Boichuk made overtures to the UAOC to return.

UAOC Metropolitan Andriy of Halychyna nominated the Rev. Boichuk to the episcopate of the UAOC on June 6, 1996, a move that was not approved by Patriarch Dymytrii. He was installed the following day by the metropolitan in Ivano-Frankivsk and named Bishop Ioan of the Eparchy of Rivne and Ostrih. On August 28, as the dissension within the Church was coming to a boil, Bishop Ioan invited Patriarch Dymytrii to Rivne and expressed his loyalty to the head of the UAOC.

But in September, when the patriarch moved to relieve Archbishop Petro of Lviv and Archbishop Mykhail of their duties, Bishop Ioan and Archbishop Mykhail led the effort that resulted in the patriarch's ouster. In December 1996 Bishop Ioan was appointed chief administrator of the UOAC.

The latest fiasco leaves the Church in further turmoil, although Bishop Ihor told The Weekly that, with the departure of Bishop Ioan, the UAOC finally may have been purified of its unhealthy elements. Nonetheless, the UAOC remains a Church in trouble.

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