We have received the following email from the Ukrainian Catholic University. It is important to read it in this context:
- Since the protests began following the government’s decision to reject association with the EU and to accept a trade and loan deal with Russia, the Ukrainian Catholic clergy responded with requests for spiritual and pastoral ministry and have been credited with keeping the demonstrations peaceful
- In mid January, the government threatened to de-register the Ukrainian Catholic Church because of this ministry. The Church had been suppressed for over four decades from 1945 until the early 1990s, its property expropriated and handed to the Russian Orthodox Church which had had hardly any presence in Western Ukraine, and its members and clergy forced to conform to the Moscow Patriarchate. The Ukrainian Catholic Church, the largest of all the Eastern Catholic Churches by far, has enjoyed an astonishing renaissance since its liberation under Gorbachev’s rule of the former Soviet Union before Ukraine recovered its independence; this has included the recovery of its own dioceses and parishes, much to the resentment of the Moscow Patriarchate, which persists in condemning it with the offensive terms “Uniate”, despite its union with Roman and the Western Latin Church originally predating the Great Schism
- When the government attempted a coup d’état and introduced repressive public order regulations affecting freedom of speech, the right of assembly, the rule of law and the right to due process in court, it attacked the peaceful demonstrators and provoked the arrival of both a tiny contingent of far right young men, as well as violent supporters of the government party. There have been consistent reports of riot police in Ukrainian uniforms with Russian accents, Russian markings on troop vehicles, and grievous bodily harm perpetrated on protestors by government supporters and agents unrestrained by the police.
- President Putin of Russia has singled out Western Ukrainian clergy for provoking the violence, attributed to their connections with right-wing political groups. This is aimed at the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which is strong in the West of the country, which had become united with the more Orthodox East following 1945, but which is also growing across the country, not least in the capital, Kyiv. His comments reveal the pressure behind the Culture Ministry’s letter to Patriarch Sviatoslav threating dissolution, as under Stalin, a few weeks before.
- The Moscow Patriarchate has repeated this falsehood of linking the Ukrainian Church with far-right violence and political activism, and called on the Russian government to enforce a choice on the Ukrainian people in favour of integration of the Russian regional sphere: Russia, the still communist dictatorship of Belarus and what would be the formerly free Ukraine.
- The Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University has been arrested and prosecuted for traffic offences in a city where he was not present while engaged on peace-keeping activities among the protestors. UCU is the only Catholic institute of higher education east of the former Iron Curtain and, with its Business School and international academic connections, a sustained advocate of ethical standard in public and economic life. It is thus a determined critic of government and business corruption.
- It is only fair to say that since the violence erupted, Ukrainian Orthodox monks and priests have also lent their efforts to preventing bloodshed – the Ukrainian Orthodox-Moscow patriarchate monks of the Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv (Kiev is the Old Slavonic version of the city’s name, also preferred by Russian speakers), the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (which is part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople), and the currently uncanonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate. Protestant and Latin Catholic leaders have also condemned the government’s provocation of the people, including physical and mortal attacks on unarmed civilians, as has the Mufti of Crimea, who has told President Yanukovich that he will have to answer to God for his crimes.
- Perplexingly, however, Pope Francis has said nothing personally in support of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and its University. Yet there has been unequivocal support from the Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, the Canadian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Polish Catholic Bishops, and Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia. The Catholic press in England, too, seem not to have recognised how serious the position is for human rights, corruption of the rule of law and freedom – including that of the sister Ukrainian Catholic Church. (Bishop Borys Gudziak mentioned below, is the Bishop for Ukrainian Catholics in western Europe centred in Paris, and was the first rector of UCU).
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