Thank you, God, that I am not like these Ukrainian Moskals

12:59

Author: Nazar Golovko

Like the Pharisee in the parable, the OCU does not see itself as sinful. Photo: UOJ

The Holy Fathers taught Christians to see their own sins. Where the Fathers are no longer read, repentance becomes a calendar topic for sermons rather than a way of life.

There is one question to which a Christian cannot have two answers: “Are you a sinner or not?”

Not because saying yes is simply the “proper” answer, but because there are no people who do not sin.

The Apostle John puts it bluntly: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). The Apostle Paul, to whom the Lord entrusted so much, calls himself the foremost of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). And the Church turned his words into the prayer every Christian says before the Chalice: “Of whom I am chief.”

Repentance as a way of life

What such repentance actually looks like – and why we need it – can be clearly seen in the sermons of His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry.

“Repentance continually corrects the human soul, sets it right, and makes it capable of receiving the God whom nothing can contain,” the UOC Primate says. He calls humility, without which repentance is impossible, the greatest and most powerful virtue. The best way to correct another person, he says, is to pray for them and correct yourself.

According to Metropolitan Onuphry, a humble person has the courage to submit his life to the will of God. You cannot wait until you feel like praying, fasting, or forgiving.

Notice the direction: first correct yourself, not your neighbor. Look inward, not around you. That is the heart of Orthodox spirituality.

In other words, seeing your own sin is not merely a matter of honesty. It requires a particular kind of spiritual vision. Without it, sin simply becomes invisible.

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The question answered with slippers

A recent episode showed what happens when that ability to see one’s own sin is lost. OCU “priest” Oleksii Filiuk of the Ternopil Eparchy was asked that very question: “Tell me, Father Oleksii, are you a sinner or not?”

Instead of answering, he appealed to public opinion: some people, he said, consider him a sinner, while others think he is a “normal person.” Then he invited people to come to his home, see how he lives, and try walking in his slippers – “kaptsi,” to use his exact word. Then they could judge him. As evidence in his defense, he added that he had never “humiliated” or “insulted” anyone.

One clarification is important here: this is not about Filiuk himself, nor about catching one particular man out. The point is something else.

An OCU “priest” was asked about his soul – about what is inside him – and he responded by pointing to what is outside. In this worldview, sinfulness is no longer what a person knows about himself before God. It is what other people think of him. Some say one thing, others another – so, apparently, the jury is still out and more data must be collected.

That is the logic of an opinion poll, not the logic of spiritual life. And his list – “I haven’t humiliated anyone, I haven’t insulted anyone” – sounds remarkably like the list in the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, where the Pharisee likewise declares that he is not an adulterer, not an extortioner, and “not like this publican.”

Interestingly, the parallel with that parable surfaces elsewhere in Filiuk’s remarks. In a video filmed in the Holy Land, he spots a group of Ukrainian pilgrims and calls them “Moskals from Rivne.”

Obviously, “Moskal” in Ukrainian speech – modern or otherwise – is not a neutral description. It is a label. A way of marking people as outsiders. Ukrainians who have traveled to the Holy Sepulchre are, in the eyes of an OCU priest, neither brothers in the faith nor even fellow countrymen. They are “Moskals” – a hostile category.

And Filiuk repeatedly emphasizes that he is not like them.

The Ternopil publication Za Zbruchem once even used Filiuk’s words about UOC believers as a headline: “The Moskals killed her son, and the mother still goes there.” Those words, it should be remembered, were said about a woman who lost her son in the war and continued praying in her own church. There is no compassion here. No attempt to understand.

There is an attempt to humiliate and insult.

Christ gave two commandments that are violated here at once: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matt. 7:1) and “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44). A man who brands pilgrims at holy sites with contemptuous labels and reproaches a grieving mother for praying in the church where she baptized the son who later gave his life for his country has fulfilled neither commandment.

And the crucial point is that he does not even notice. When he says he has insulted no one, he is not necessarily being disingenuous. He genuinely does not see condemnation where condemnation is present. Why? Because in his picture of the world, he is “on the right side.”

Searching for the Holy Fathers

If this were merely the story of one rural OCU “priest,” there would be little reason to write about it.

But let us see how typical Filiuk’s example is of Dumenko’s organization as a whole. Let us look for what OCU representatives have to say about the things at the very heart of Orthodox spirituality: humility, repentance, warfare against thoughts, and the Jesus Prayer.

The words “repentance” and “humility” do appear on the OCU’s official website. In Epifaniy Dumenko’s Lenten sermons, for example, they surface regularly. On Forgiveness Sunday, he spoke of “the ascetic labor of intensified prayer, repentance, and self-denial.” In the fifth week of Lent, he spoke about the repentance of St. Mary of Egypt and “fasting as abstinence and humility.” On the Sunday of the Cross, he spoke of the humility of the Son of God. He has also said that “Great Lent is a time of repentance and correction.”

All these texts have one thing in common: they are rigidly tied to the calendar.

Lent arrives – and, according to the script, it is time to say something about repentance. The words are smooth, correct, and safe. They demand nothing. They could have been lifted from even the most elementary seminary handbook.

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They do not emerge from personal experience – still less from the experience of the Holy Fathers. We found not a single reference to the Fathers in these sermons.

Nor does Epifaniy once speak about the Jesus Prayer. There is no attempt to explain how a person actually fights anger, how humility differs from despondency, or what happens inside the soul when repentance begins.

For Dumenko, repentance is a sermon topic. It is not a way of life.

A search for the Jesus Prayer produces a result that is hard to contemplate without a bitter smile. In the “patriotic” denominational sphere, it is Greek Catholic bishops who speak about noetic prayer, and the UGCC catechism devotes a section to it.

Yet OCU sermons on the subject are nowhere to be found.

Is it not strange that Uniates speak about the Jesus Prayer while an organization calling itself the Orthodox Church of Ukraine does not?

Who reads the Fathers?

There is one sign that almost unmistakably distinguishes the Church from an imitation of it: its relationship with the Holy Fathers.

In the OCU, the Fathers are barely quoted. Neither Dumenko nor his “bishops” nor parish “clergy” such as Filiuk build their preaching on Abba Dorotheos or St. John Climacus, St. Gregory the Theologian or St. Isaac the Syrian. For the most part, they do not even mention them.

One possible explanation is simple: the Fathers are not being read – or, if they are, they are not being read in order to put their teaching into practice.

Yet the Holy Fathers are not museum pieces brought out for special dates on the Church calendar. They are a key to the Gospel.

The Apostle Peter warned that “no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Pet. 1:20). Scripture is not understood however each person happens to prefer, but through the experience of those who have actually walked the path it describes.

Someone who has never read St. John Climacus on anger will fail to recognize anger in himself. Someone who has never read Abba Dorotheos on judging others will call pilgrims “Moskals” and sincerely believe he has judged no one.

Everything else follows from there.

That is why the seizure of churches is not perceived in the OCU as contradicting the Gospel. The slogan “Ukraine Above All” is not perceived as contradicting the first and greatest commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart” (Matt. 22:37). Hostility toward believers of another Church is not perceived as violating Christ’s words: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35).

And it would be too simple to call all of this mere Pharisaism or hypocrisy.

The problem runs deeper.

The OCU simply lacks the instrument that allows a person to see sin within himself. People do not see themselves as sinners and do not experience themselves as such because they have lost the very means by which sin is seen.

What is passed through the laying on of hands

Filiuk, like the OCU as a whole, constantly appeals to apostolic succession. In the video already mentioned, he says a “bishop” laid hands on him – therefore, “apostolic succession” unquestionably exists.

Let us leave aside the fact that before 2018, no Local Church recognized the UOC-KP as possessing apostolic succession – much has already been written about that.

There is another side to the question. The Church has never understood apostolic succession as a mere formality.

The Apostle Paul tells Timothy: “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust” (1 Tim. 6:20).

But what exactly was “committed” to him? Ordination alone?

The Apostle explains: “Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me” (2 Tim. 1:13); and “the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2).

Succession, therefore, is not merely the transmission of the authority to ordain bishops and priests. It is the transmission of teaching, the spirit of the Orthodox faith, and Holy Tradition itself. The laying on of hands seals that transmission. It does not replace it.

Ordination alone is not enough to make someone Orthodox. Arius, after all, was also canonically ordained.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a disciple of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, who himself had heard the Apostle John, put it in terms that leave little to add: “Where, therefore, the gifts of the Lord have been placed, there it behooves us to learn the truth from those who possess that succession of the Church which is from the apostles, and among whom exists that which is sound and blameless in conduct, as well as that which is unadulterated and incorrupt in speech” (Against Heresies, IV, 26, 5).

In other words, St. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, points to three things, not one: succession, life, and teaching.

Remove life and teaching, and only the shell remains – emptied of the truth about Christ.

St. Vincent of Lérins, in turn, gave the Church a criterion it has repeated for a millennium and a half: “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” – what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.

That is Tradition.

Not “some say this, others say that,” but what the Church has always known about man, sin, and repentance.

This is why declaring someone Orthodox on paper is not enough. Nor is simply baptizing him enough.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem writes: “If thou be playing the hypocrite, men baptize thee now, but the Spirit will not baptize thee. But if thou hast come in faith, men minister in what is seen, and the Holy Ghost bestows that which is unseen.”

A person, then, must be Orthodox in doctrine, in his way of thinking, and in how he answers the simplest questions. And this is precisely what the OCU lacks. It takes what lies on the surface and helps create the appearance of Orthodoxy: vestments, iconostases, bits of theological vocabulary. But it goes no deeper. Because going deeper requires labor. And that labor begins with admitting: I am a sinner.

The diagnosis

Filiuk is not an accident. He is not an exception. He is an exact imprint of the organization to which he belongs.

The OCU emerged from an act of purely external recognition in which there was no repentance, no request for forgiveness, no acknowledgment of guilt for decades of schism.

There was only a document.

In other words, embedded in the organization’s very foundation is the same logic Filiuk reproduced before the camera: not “What do I know about myself before God?” but “What do others say about me?”

And that logic reproduces itself at every level.

An organization that declared itself blameless without the slightest attempt at repentance or inner transformation produces clergy who consider themselves “normal people” and do not even think of repentance.

Everything else follows.

They do not read the Fathers, and so they know nothing of the inner warfare. Knowing nothing of the inner warfare, they fail to recognize condemnation or malice within themselves. Failing to see condemnation, they seize other people’s churches with a clear conscience.

And the circle closes.

Only one thing can break it – precisely what, by definition, is missing in the OCU: an answer to the question with which we began.

And that question is definitely not about slippers.

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