In April 2025, the next issue of “Una Sancta”, a magazine dedicated to rapprochement between Christians, was published. The general theme of the magazine is “Reconciliation between groups”. As an illustration of possible ways of reconciliation, there was published the article of Sergii Bortnyk “The Search for Reconciliation in Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Three Visions and Future Prospects”.
The first part of this article is devoted to an overview of the “church confrontation on the ground”. In particular, it provides examples of parish transitions from one Orthodox jurisdiction to another, and mentions laws in the field of church relations adopted in Ukraine in recent years. The most striking example of the situation on the ground is the statistics of transitions, when in the Cherkassy region in 2024, 30 parishes and only one priest moved from the UOC to the OCU.
The article analyses other factors influencing the confrontation between the two Orthodox jurisdictions, including the ties with Russia of a number of senior UOC hierarchs. It also presents facts that destroy stereotypes about confrontation of the monolithic groups. In particular, it is curious that not only the majority of the members of the UOC Synod graduated from the seminary in Zahorsk, but also both hierarchs of the UOC who joined the OCU created in 2019, as well as Metropolitan Sofroniy Dmytruk, who for many years was a symbol of autocephalous aspirations within the UOC.
Then the author offers three perspectives on the complex situation in Ukrainian Orthodoxy. The first is canonical, more typical of the logic of the UOC; the second is statehood approach, for which the thesis “for an independent state – an independent church” is typical; the third is civil, which takes into account the cultural, regional and age diversity in Ukrainian Orthodoxy.
On our website, you can find the German version of this article of Sergii Bortnyk (https://www.academic-initiative.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Una-Sancta-dt.pdf) and its Ukrainian original (https://www.academic-initiative.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Una-Sancta-ukr.pdf).
