Bishop Ioann (Bodnarchuk) of the Moscow Patriarchate proclaimed the foundation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church on this day in 1989. As a retired bishop, Bishop Ioann did not have the right to perform ordinations without the authorization of a ruling hierarch. Having joined a group of Ukrainian autocephalous clergy activists, he ordained a deacon on October 22, 1989, in Sts. Peter and Paul church in Lʹviv. The Ukrainian scholar Serhii Shumilo explains Bishop Ioann’s background: “A native of Ternopil Region who was born into a Uniate family that had re-joined the Orthodox Church, he had been associated with the anti-Soviet underground OUN-UPA [Ukrainian Insurgent Army] in his youth, for which he was sentenced in 1949 and spent time in Stalin’s camps and in exile. In 1956, he entered Leningrad Theological Seminary and Academy and was Bishop of Zhytomyr and Ovruch from 1977 onward. As a former participant in the OUN-UPA underground and a former prisoner of Stalin’s concentration camps, he was ideally suited for the role of the UAOC leader” (“Self-styled “Bishop” Vikentii Chekalin and His Involvement in the First UAOC Episcopal Consecrations in March 1990,” Historical Studies of the Russian Church Abroad). However, the US-based Metropolitan Mstyslav (Skrypnyk) was already the head of a “Ukrainian Autocephalous Church.” And the clergy and laity began to recognize him as their head. On November 13, 1989, the Moscow Patriarchate defrocked Bishop Ioann (Bodnarchuk). On March 31, 1990, Bodnarchuk and the self-professed bishop Vikentii (Chekalin) consecrated Bodnarchuk’s brother as a bishop, with the monastic name of Vasilii. The only reliable information about his clerical status was that he was a defrocked deacon of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1989, Chekalin tried to be received into the ROCOR but was rejected. Later, Ioann Bondarchuk called him a bishop of the Russian Church Abroad. As Serhii Shumilo writes: “In late summer 1990, the ROCOR Synod of Bishops issued an official statement: ‘The ROCOR Synod of Bishops notifies the clergy and laity of all the Orthodox parishes that Vikentii Chekalin who passes himself off as a bishop of the Catacomb Church recognized by the Russian Church Abroad is not such, and all the sacraments performed by him cannot be recognized as grace-giving… The ROCOR Synod of Bishops warns against even greater canonical mistakes because the fulfillment of episcopal consecration could involve someone not possessing the grace of apostolic succession.” That warning went unheeded by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which, in December 2018 incorporated the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, originating from Chekalin and Bondarchuk, into the new “Orthodox Church in Ukraine.” This poses a canon law question: can the Ecumenical Patriarchate create a hierarchy ex nihilo? | 
