The Ukrainian Orthodox Church adjusts its calendar to move away from Moscow

Next Christmas promises to be historic in Ukraine. For the first time, most of the country’s Orthodox Christians will celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25, instead of January 7. Last year parishes were given the freedom to follow the revised Julian calendar, aligned with the Gregorian, to show their repudiation of the Russian invasion and many congregations did so. From September 1 that will be the norm.

This has been agreed by the Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which formally adopted the so-called Revised Julian Calendar last Wednesday to mark distances with the Russian Church, which continues to use the original. The large-scale invasion of Ukraine has been the definitive push to take a step that has been debated internally for some time. “This is the decision that the majority of the faithful of our Church and the majority of Ukrainian society expected from us,” Metropolitan Epifanius, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, said in a statement explaining that the parishes that They wish to continue using the old Julian calendar, if the majority of their faithful so desire.

Actually, the metropolitan archbishop of Kiev and spokesman for the country’s Orthodox Church, Yevstratiy Zoria, explains in an interview that for Ukrainians the question of the calendar “has always been not a question of dates but of national identity.” They clung to it in the 16th century when Ukraine was part of the Polish confederation and the Catholic state tried to force all Orthodox Christians to adopt the Gregorian calendar decided by Pope Gregory XIII in Rome in 1582, and they did it again in the 20th century when “staying true to the Julian calendar was a form of mild resistance to Bolshevik oppression”. This time, however, to defend their national identity, the Ukrainian Orthodox have come to the conclusion that what they should do is the opposite, leave behind that almanac that unites them with Moscow and join its revised version, the one followed by the western churches for their holy days.

“Now the majority of Ukrainian society, including believers, feel that calendar unity with Russia is a form of subordination to Russia and Russian culture,” says the spokesman for the Kyiv Patriarchate, for whom the war has left It is clear that the Russian Orthodox Church is nothing more than “an agency of the Kremlin”, part of its propaganda machine. The social attitude towards the calendar, he continues, is the same as what many Ukrainians now feel towards the Russian language. Although it is his first language, he has stopped using it in favor of Ukrainian as a result of the invasion, he explains in English. “The USSR tried to erase the Ukrainian language. Now I understand that if I use the Russian language to pronounce on public affairs, Vladimir Putin and his entourage will think that if we Ukrainians speak Russian, follow the Russian calendar and Russian culture we cannot be anything other than Russian. For this reason, our decision to change the calendar is part of our resistance to the aggression”. His calculation is that between 85 and 90% of the country’s Orthodox congregations will adopt the reform.

Currently, all the national Orthodox Churches that support the independence of the Kyiv Patriarchate from Moscow, recognized in 2019, already follow the revised Julian calendar (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia and Albania ) while those that oppose it (Russia, Georgia, Serbia, Poland and Jerusalem) have remained faithful to the old one. “I think it’s clear who we should be with,” Zoria notes. They cannot force anyone, but he calls on “all Ukrainian Orthodox to join this reform,” including those who have remained faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church. Its mere existence in Ukraine “is an anomaly”, insists the archbishop, since in this branch of Christianity the tradition is that the borders of the churches coincide with the policies and there is only one per country, with management autonomy. “Russians don’t recognize that Ukrainians have their own national identity and believe that we are just part of the great Russian nation,” he says at St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. On the way out, the arrival of the coffin of a fallen soldier serves as a brutal reminder of the tactics Putin is prepared to use to assert his imperialist ideology.