by Metropolitan Ambrose of Tver
“The Church is not measured by passports.”
Friends, today the news agencies reported that, by decree of the President of Ukraine, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kyiv and All Ukraine has been stripped of the citizenship of the very country in which he was born and to which he has devoted his entire life. I must confess that such news always sounds like an echo of well‑known pages of Church history, when a secular power, translating spiritual matters into the language of passports and legal statuses, tries to mark out the borders of the Church.
History has known many persecutors—from Nero, who mixed theatrics with bloody reprisals against Christians, to modern authorities who attempt, “lawfully,” to silence believers. The logic is always the same: declare the inconvenient Church “outside the law.” Yet time shows that physical borders, bans and decrees are helpless before the Gospel. The more clearly a government sets itself above Christ’s flock, the more evident the true nature of its action becomes—not secular, but purely religious: it is persecution.
We often hear about the “supremacy of democracy,” which the Ukrainian authorities raise as a banner. But if the culmination of such democracy is the revocation of citizenship from the Primate of the canonical Church, who has formed more than one generation of the faithful, then this must be its “highest achievement.” It is sorrowful that the right to faith and to civic belonging has suddenly become subject to the political moods of the day.
Nor can we ignore the ecclesial dimension. In recent years we have seen the consequences of the intervention initiated by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. He who should have been *primus inter pares* supplied the pretext for schism and, in fact, unleashed a wave of persecution. Today’s decree stripping His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of citizenship is but one bitter fruit of that process. Such, alas, is the real “practice” of those resounding decisions proclaimed “in the name of unity.”
The Church is not measured by passports and does not live by the calendar of political campaigns. She stands upon the Cornerstone, Who is Christ. And if someone’s democracy or someone’s ecclesiastical ambitions end in persecution of the faithful, we have the right to call things by their proper name: this is open warfare against God.
Let us pray for peace and sound judgment for all sides. Let us renounce malice, yet not remain silent when freedom to believe in Christ is trampled. O Lord, strengthen Thy Church and grant all of us the courage of true witness.
We are called to answer not with anger, but with prayer. Let us pray for His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry, for the entire Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and for all who find themselves under pressure. And let us remember:
“Fear not, little flock” (Lk 12:32)
—the Lord remains with those who stay faithful to Him.
May the Lord keep us all.
