Ukraine took a major step toward establishing an Orthodox Church independent of Moscow, a move likely to increase already heightened tensions
MOSCOW — Ukraine took a major step on Saturday toward establishing its own, autonomous Orthodox Church, setting the stage for increased tensions with Russia by altering a centuries-old religious tradition under which the Kiev church answered to Moscow.
Some 190 bishops, priests and other church figures spent the day closeted in St. Sophia’s Cathedral in downtown Kiev to elect the newly unified Ukrainian church’s head, Metropolitan Epiphanius. He is scheduled to travel in January to Istanbul, the historical seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church, to receive an official order granting autonomy.
Hundreds of supporters of the move cheered and some wept as President Petro O. Poroshenko, who had attended the session, emerged from the cathedral to announce that Ukraine had a new church leader.
Quoting from the national poet, Taras Shevchenko, Mr. Poroshenko said that “Ukraine will no longer drink Moscow poison from the Moscow cup,” and he called on supporters to remember the day’s events as “the final acquisition of independence from Russia.”
Many of the faithful have long been hesitant about breaking the church’s historical ties with Moscow. But Russia’s fostering of a violent separatist movement in eastern Ukraine since 2014 and its seizure of Crimea the same year invigorated the move for a church independent of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Opponents of the Russian church in Ukraine said some priests had refused to perform last rites for soldiers killed in the fighting in eastern Ukraine, and some had even criticized the dead, accusing them of participating in a fratricidal war.
The step toward independence is sure to antagonize both Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who have pursued a “Russian World” alliance of states bound to Moscow by tradition, culture and religion.
“What kind of church is this?” Mr. Poroshenko said in his speech, noting that he would travel with the new leader of the Ukrainian church to collect the autonomy order, known as the Tomos of Autocephaly. “This is a church without Putin. What kind of church is this? It is a church without Kirill. What kind of church is this? It is a church without prayers for the Russian government and Russian military.
