MOSCOW, October 2 – Novosti. The Ukrainian online publication Information Stream reports that the head of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Pavel (Pavel Lebed), was detained while trying to take church property out of Ukraine.
“The head of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, Peter Lebed, known as Metropolitan Pavel, was detained at the border. Vladyka Pavel was caught trying to smuggle out church valuables,” the publication’s website says.
The publication claims that the clergyman allegedly wrote out for himself the accompanying documents for the export of relics.
In September, a draft appeal to the Ukrainian government was registered on the website of the Ukrainian parliament on the transfer to the schismatic structure ” Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU) for free use of the complexes of buildings of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and the Pochaev Assumption Lavra, which are currently in the free possession of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church . churches .
The structure called the “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU) was formed from schismatics, and therefore is not a church in the canonical sense. It was formed at the initiative of the ex-president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko in opposition to the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of the Moscow Patriarchate at the end of 2018 at the unification council in Kiev , which was attended mainly by schismatics. And in January 2019, the Patriarchate of Constantinople granted the OCU a “tomos of autocephaly”. However, the OCU is in fact subordinate to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and most of the 15 local Orthodox churches in the world do not recognize it as canonical.
