· - ZOiS REPORT - ORTHODOXY, GENDER, AND THE ISTANBUL CONVENTION: MAPPING THE DISCOURSE

The report explores the documents of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organi- sations (AUCCRO), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). [...] The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church Although the Orthodox churches represent most of Ukraine’s population and religious communities, other denominations have a crucial impact on the positions of the AUCCRO and of the Orthodox churches. [...] The main thesis of the message is: Gender ideologies, by denying the existence of objective human nature, the complementarity of man and woman, the values of marriage, actual- ly deny the existence of the Creator himself and cross out the truth about man as His image.25 Furthermore, on gender issues, the UGCC — as well as the smaller Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine — broadly uses the rhetoric of. [...] One of the council’s declared goals is to ‘resolutely oppose the imposition of gender and LGBT ideology on Ukrainian society’.29 25 ‘Message of the Synod of Bishops of the Kyiv-Halych Archdiocese of the UGCC on the Danger of Gender Ideology’, Religious Information Service of Ukraine, 3 December 2016, https:// risu.ua/poslannya-sinodu-yepiskopiv-kiyevo-galickogo-verhovnogo-arhiyepiskopstva-ugkc- st. [...] This remained the case even after the split in world Or- thodoxy in 2019 and the recognition by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), the successor to the UOC-KP.33 However, the two churches’ affiliations to different parts of the Orthodox world pose a challenge for their commitment to the antigender movement.