Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Cleric: “Without 20 Years of Our Work in Parishes, Maidan Would Not Have Happened”

Mikhail Dimid, a Uniate priest and author of the book “Stones of Maidan”, spoke about the “education of people” in whose hearts “Maidan rose up”.

Without 20 years of work in the parishes, Maidan would not have happened, said the cleric of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, “chaplain of Maidan” Mikhail Dimid in an interview with the resource “Relihiyna Pravda“.

According to the Uniate priest, who took an active part in Euromaidan and was engaged in its glorification, “Maidan is unexpected help from the other world for Christians from God, so that people become fully responsible for their fate”.

Then, he noted, in the center of the Ukrainian capital, “the voice of conscience and the one who stands behind it – God” gathered “a million noble, positive-minded people” who came from cities and villages where they were “brought up by the church” and who “had Maidan in their hearts”.

“There would be no Maidan without 20 years of the work of churches in parishes,” the UGCC cleric stressed, adding that the Uniate Church “was not in the centre of attention, it was just a part of the whole, like yeast in a dough or like salt in a dish”.

Mikhail Dimid’s statements regarding the role of Uniates in organising Maidan were commented on by Orthodox publicist and blogger Aleksandr Voznesensky, who clarified that “the UGCC was both the organiser of most local maidans in 2013, and most of the support maidans outside Ukraine”.

“Terror and violence are in the blood of the Catholic Church, and more than once humanity has passed periods when Catholic clerics enthusiastically spoke about the destruction or suppression of dissenters, pointing at the sky and saying that it was the will of God. What does Christ have in common with mad fanatics whose hands are covered with blood up to the elbows? According to fanatics, they have a lot in common. But this does not mean that Christ thinks the same about these terrorists in cassocks,” wrote Aleksandr Voznesensky on his Telegram channel.

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Union of Orthodox Journalists