Head of the UGCC on the 354th day of the war: “Let us pray for those who are unjustly held in Russian captivity”
Let us pray for our brothers and sisters in the occupied territories who are going through the filtration and concentration camps of the Russian occupation authority. Let us remember in our prayers our imprisoned priests Ivan and Bohdan. May the Lord, through us, help our imprisoned brothers and sisters to return home, to be with us in the church community, united in love for their homeland. His Beatitude Sviatoslav, the Father and Head of the UGCC, asked for this in his daily military address on the 354th day of the great, bloody war.
Continuing his reflections on vocation, today, His Beatitude Sviatoslav spoke about belonging to the nation as one of its forms.
The Head of the UGCC convinces us that when God calls us to belong to the Ukrainian or other people, he wants us to respond to this call, to love our people, to be interested in their history and culture, and to speak their language well.
“True Christian patriotism is love for the land that raised you and gave you the way to live. You cannot despise the vocation to belong to your people,” warned the Head of the UGCC.“The Ukrainian people today have a mission — a Christian task and vocation among other peoples worldwide. Ukraine has become the epicenter of world events where humanity’s future is forged. And we, as faithful sons and daughters of our nation, must defend its right to exist with arms, but the primary motivation for the Ukrainian dedication today is love for our people,” he said.
We thank the Lord, says His Beatitude Sviatoslav, who gave us the vocation to be sons and daughters of the Ukrainian people, who today weep, suffer, are a martyr nation, and installed so many heroes of the Christian faith throughout the thousand-year history of life in God, Christian life in our lands.
“Today we ask all the holy martyrs of the Ukrainian people to help us to be patriots, good sons, and daughters of the nation that we are called to accept as a gift and vocation from God, belonging to which is the key to the triumph of each of us. And the heritage of our national culture today is an asset, a treasure from which a new, great, bright future for our people and our Motherland will grow,” added the Head and Father of the UGCC.
The UGCC Department for Information
