Dumenko at OCU “council” talks about monasteries but hides number of monks

By joining the OCU, Lotysh 'sharply increased' the number of OCU monks. Photo: UOJ

OCU head Epifaniy Dumenko, in a report at the “bishops’ council,” presented statistics about his organization. According to him, the OCU has over 9,000 parishes, and in the past year 250 UOC communities “rejected the non-canonical authority of the Moscow Patriarchate and joined the family of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”

Dumenko also stated that the OCU has more than 90 male and female monasteries. However, he did not mention the number of monks in his organization. The last official data on this comes from DESS statistics for 2021, when the OCU had 233 monks.

As a reminder, in 2022, DESS head Olena Bohdan said that the OCU’s monasteries in Kyiv included about 50 people. If that number has not changed significantly in either direction over the years, one might estimate that on average, Dumenko’s monasteries outside the capital have around two people each.

Previously, Serhiy Dumenko reacted harshly to Olena Bohdan’s remark that the entire OCU has fewer monks than the UOC has in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. According to him, it is not DESS’s place to comment on such statistics.

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