Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Week 213 of the War: We Are a Universal Church and the Hope for Ukraine’s Resilience
Our Church has endured, having undergone the trials of persecution and life in hiding, and today stands as a beacon of hope for Ukraine’s resilience during the war. This was stated by His Beatitude Sviatoslav, the Father and Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, in his traditional video address on the 213th week of the Russia’s full-scale sacrilegious war against Ukraine, in which our people and our state are suffering unjust aggression.
The Primate noted that although spring has arrived in Ukraine this week, hostilities are escalating along the front lines: “Every night and day, our cities and villages come under targeted shelling from Russian missiles, drones, and other weapons.”
The Head of the Church thanked the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Lord God, and our defenders for saving our lives, so that this week Ukraine can declare to the whole world: Ukraine stands! Ukraine fights! Ukraine prays!
Summing up the past week, the spiritual leader noted that events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the elimination of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Soviet Union were held in many of our metropolias, eparchies, exarchates, and communities around the world.
“As we commemorate this somber anniversary, we seek to gain a deeper understanding of historical truth, but also to stand before contemporary Ukrainians and our Orthodox brothers in a conscious awareness of the past,” said His Beatitude Sviatoslav.
A significant intellectual event was an academic roundtable, held at Taras Shevchenko National University, organized jointly with the Institute of National Remembrance, the Interdepartmental Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Institute of Church History at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
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“There Is No Ukrainian Nation-Building Without the Role of the UGCC,” — His Beatitude Sviatoslav at Kyiv Roundtable on the Lviv Pseudo-Council
“New archival documents show that the liquidation of our Church in the Soviet Union occurred according to the classic pattern of the liquidation of the Uniate Church in the Russian Empire. Scholars emphasized the similarity between the Polotsk Council of 1839, when our Kyiv Metropolia was liquidated within the Russian Empire, and the pseudo-council that took place in Lviv 80 years ago,” said the Primate.
“But the Church cannot be destroyed,” assures His Beatitude Sviatoslav. “Our Church has endured; it has withstood persecution and life in hiding, and today it represents hope for Ukraine’s resilience during the war and for the reconstruction of our state once it ends… At the same time, we are a universal Church, in communion with the successor of the Apostle Peter in our day, and open to the universal dimension and the needs of Ukrainians worldwide.”
