KIEV, May 26. /TASS/. Head of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine Epiphanius (Dumenko) on Thursday said the church had asked Constantinople Patriarch Bartholomew, who bears the title of ecumenical patriarch, and heads of local churches to remove from office Russian Patriarch Kirill, accusing him of heresy.
"The Council of Bishops of the OCU appealed to the Ecumenical Patriarch and the primates of local churches with a request to condemn the spiritual crimes of Kirill Gundyaev and deprive him of the office due to the spread of heretical ethnophyletic (ethnophyletism - preference for national interests over the general church interests - TASS) teachings about the ‘Russian world’ and the spread of schism among the Orthodox," he said on Twitter.
A similar accusation of ethnophyletism was leveled by the Patriarchate of Constantinople against the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for its decision to proclaim autocephaly from the Church of Constantinople during the country's struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century. The Church of Constantinople at its local council in 1872 condemned ethnophyletism as a heresy.
In 2018, after a so-called unifying council in Kiev, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was created from two schismatic church groups, including the Kiev Patriarchate. Later, it received autocephaly from Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. The Russian Orthodox Church and the UOC do not recognize the canonical status of the new religious organization. They consider both the tomos of autocephaly and the conference in Kiev as void. After the creation of the OCU, its supporters began to seize the temples of the canonical church by force.