For two decades, Ilya Solkan served as the parish priest in a tiny Ukrainian village outside the capital, Kyiv. He baptized babies, blessed marriages and conducted funerals. The Orthodox church stood at the heart of the village and Mr. Solkan was central to its life.
“Being a priest is my God-given calling,” he said in an interview at his house in the village of Blystavytsya, describing the church as his “second home.”
Today, he is unemployed and has been ostracized from the village after parishioners booted him out last October for putting politics into his pastoral care.
The removal of Mr. Solkan, a priest with no public profile beyond his home village, reflects the gradual rejection by much of Ukrainian society of a church that answers to Moscow — a process that has been accelerated by the war. Specifically, it speaks to the division between the two branches of Orthodox Christianity, the most predominant religion in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the Orthodox Church has an independent national arm, which formally gained canonical status from the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2018, and an arm, to which Mr. Solkan belongs, that is tied to the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow. For years, his branch has been a symbol of Russian influence and, since the invasion, it has become a target of Ukraine’s drive to rid itself of Russian cultural influence.
The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, is an enthusiastic supporter of President Vladimir. V. Putin of Russia. His church has promoted Moscow’s view that Ukraine’s cultural roots are in Russia, a rationale that the Russian leader has used to justify the full-scale invasion.
Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church have denied that they support the invasion and argued that their institution is a victim of persecution — an issue that Russia raised at a U.N. Security Council meeting in late July. Days before the meeting, one of the church’s own vicars lashed out at Patriarch Kirill in an angry letter after Russian missiles badly damaged one of the largest Orthodox churches in the country, the Odesa Transfiguration Cathedral, saying “your bishops and priests consecrate and bless the tanks and rockets that bomb our peaceful cities.”
Villagers say that Mr. Solkan for years had peppered his sermons with expressions of support for the Kremlin’s foreign policy — for example, saying that Moscow was right when it annexed Crimea illegally in 2014 — and that he had regularly spoken to them in the Russian language rather than in Ukrainian.
“Russia was always using the church as a tool of propaganda influence and, as the inhabitants of this village, it was unacceptable for us,” said Zoya Dehtyar, the head of the parish council, which voted him out.
Mr. Solkan declined to comment on his politics, fearing that anything he said would land him in trouble.
His branch of the church is under broad pressure in Ukraine.
A bill is going through Ukraine’s Parliament that would outlaw…
2023-08-03 01:14:55
Link from www.nytimes.com
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