KIEV, Jan. 13 – President Viktor Yanukovych’s government threatened to take legal action to ban the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, one of the oldest and most powerful churches in the country, for allegedly supporting protesters.

The church’s priests have frequently prayed on the Maidan square in Kiev along with other confessions in front of thousands of peaceful protesters unhappy with Yanukovych’s foreign and domestic policies over the past two months.

The Culture Ministry, in a recent letter to the church, warned of the action, citing legislation that requires formal approval of local government for holding public prayers in specific places.

The last time the strongly pro-Ukrainian church and its priests were persecuted was when the Soviet government imposed its rule over western regions of Ukraine before and after World War II.

“It’s quite interesting that in this letter, for the first time in the independent Ukraine, there is a warning, or you can call it a threat, that the religious communities of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church may be deprived of their legal status,” Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the church, said at a press conference. “We thought that times of the persecution of the church had been long gone.”

Arseniy Yatseniuk, the leader of the opposition Batkivshchyna party, is a follower of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church along with millions of other Ukrainians that mostly live in western regions of the country.

The church did not exist, as such, until the Union of Brest in the late 16th century, but its roots go back to the very beginning of Christianity in Mediaeval Slavic State of the Kievan Rus.

It is one of the successor churches to the acceptance of Christianity by Grand Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev, in the year of 988.

The Church has followed the spread of the Ukrainian diaspora, and now has some 40 hierarchs in over a dozen countries on four continents, including three other metropolitans in Poland, the United States, and Canada.

Archbishop Shevchuk said the government may be seeking to punish the church for the fact that its priests have participated in the protests of the people.

"The reason is the very fact that the clergy are among the faithful who spontaneously came to peaceful protest," he said. "We always have been and will of the people, it is the core of the church.”

The threats against the church triggered major response from opposition lawmakers that plan to initiate a meeting of the culture committee in Parliament on January 15 to address the developments.

“This is an unprecedented letter from the Culture Ministry,” Viacheslav Kyrylenko, the lawmaker, said Monday.

Yanukovych’s press service issued a statement later on Monday in a apparent attempt to switch the subject from the protests towards doing work to amend legislation.

“People should have the right to pray where they want,” Yanukovych was quoted in the statement. "We need to soften the law and provide an opportunity to pray for the faithful wherever they wish.”

At least 50,000 opponents of Yanukovych rallied in central Kiev on Sunday to call on the U.S. and the European Union to impose the sanctions against his closets allies. (tl/ez)