State and Problems of Religious Life in Ukraine

Abstract

The only indicators of religious life that are currently fixed by state authorities are existing religious organizations. The official statistics of the religious network, submitted by the State Committee on Nationalities and Religions in early 2008, recorded the presence of 33841 religious organizations in Ukraine in more than one hundred different religious movements, churches and communities (778 more than at the beginning of 2007). This figure includes 32,493 religious communities, 421 monasteries (6,598 inhabitants), 192 religious schools with 18,375 students, 333 missions, and 74 fraternities. The confessions print 383 newspapers and magazines. Considering that the law does not define the obligation to register religious organizations and some of them use it without deliberately going for registration, and that some are officially due to some motives of non-fixed religious movements, and therefore their organizations, then official statistics of the public authority are clearly incomplete. However, even the existing evidence of a kind of religious renaissance in the country. For comparison, in the communist years in Ukraine there were officially recognized only 9 religious movements, which had about 4,5 thousand religious organizations. There were 14 monasteries, one Orthodox seminary in Odessa, and the Orthodox Herald magazine.