Your Holiness, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople!
I
am addressing you on behalf of the numerous and long-suffering flock and
clergy, monastics and believers of the Diocese of Cherkasy of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church.
Please
do not regard my direct address to you as a manifestation of some audacity or
non-compliance with the church etiquette or protocol. I have two weighty
reasons therefor.
The first one is that at the time, long before the events pertaining to the granting of the Tomos to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), when you and I served together and conversed at the ancient Sumela Monastery, and also had long conversations at the Phanar, you yourself gave me this right: to talk to you directly about problems of Orthodoxy in Ukraine. And I will sin before God and before men if I do not exercise this right now. And the second reason is the tragic circumstances in which my diocese, as well as the entire Orthodoxy in Ukraine, now finds itself.
