Church Property Archives

by Ilijana Todorovic | ελληνικά | српски

Cathedral of the Resurrection, Montenegro

[This article assesses Montenegro’s controversial religion legislation approved by parliament in December, 2019.]

The main subject of the Montenegrin law is ownership of religious property. Although every single article of the law has legal deficiencies, the most significant problems are presented in Articles 62 and 63. These two articles state that three categories of property and land owned by religious communities—1) those built with public revenue, 2) those owned by “Montenegro” prior to 1918, and 3) those built with joint investment of citizens—no longer belong to the religious communities themselves but are now considered to be “cultural heritage” of Montenegro and are, therefore, to be owned by the state.

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by Anatoliy Babynskyi

Ukraine kiev church

The problem of conversions between religious communities has existed in Ukraine since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the country was struggling for independence and its religious map was being formed. The rise from the underground of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) raised questions about the restitution of property lost as a result of the forced liquidation of the Church in 1946, when almost all Church property had been transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The resurgence of the underground Greco-Catholics coincided with the revival of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). This meant that conflicts over property arose not only among Greco-Catholics and Orthodox, but also within the Orthodox Church between the Ukrainian Exarchate of the ROC, which was renamed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in 1990, and the UAOC. In 1992, part of the UOC—including Metropolitan Filaret Denisenko—merged with part of the UAOC, which resulted in a third Ukrainian Orthodox denomination: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyivan Patriarchate (UOC-KP), which, like the UAOC, is not recognized by the rest of the Orthodox world. The emergence of another Orthodox jurisdiction led to a new wave of parish conversions.