Theft by majority vote is still theft. Who owned the structures prior to the communist seizures?
The immediate thing that the article should have pointed out for the unititiated is that this disagreement is NOT a case of a conflict between Orthodox and the Catholics, but between one Orthodox Church- Moscow Patriarchate (known simply as the Russian Orthodox Church) and the Greek Catholics. This Russian Church is a bunch of xenophobic, anti-western and anti-everything loudmouths who always stir trouble. Ukraine's other Orthodox Church, UOC- Kyiv Patriarchate didn't have a single row with Greek Catholics.
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Theft by majority vote is still theft. Who owned the structures prior to the communist seizures?
Greek Catholics of course. There hasn't been a single Russian church in Galicia until Stalin came.
I must acknowledge (if it's not yet obvious to you), that i'm pretty biased against the UOC-MP. It's hard to think otherwise after seeing these so-called 'holy men', these Russian priests, running with sticks and throwing eggs at their opponents. I myself am from Bukovyna, which unlike Galicia (Greek Catholics) is of the Othodox tradition. Churches of Bukovyna were built when the region was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in the 19th cent. acquired its own metropolitan. Russia and its church were absolutely foreign as the region has never in it's existance been under Russians. And so, in 1940, Papa Stalin brought this Russian Church to Bukovyna. Thus Bukovynian long standing independent Orthodox tradition was destroyed and it became just another part of the ROC.
Since the collapse of the USSR, ROC has not retreated from Ukraine, and in Bukovyna it continues to possess most churches. Currently the conflict here is between the independent truly Ukrainian Orthodox Church- Kyiv patriarchate and the UOC-MP (the Russians).