The Ukraine: Indignation after the visit of Cardinal Kasper

The question of a patriarchy was tackled on February 19 in Moscow, during the meeting between Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the Unity of Christians, and Metropolitan Kirill, head of the department of exterior relations of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this discussion, the two parties decided to set up a joint working group which will examine this question.(see DICI n° 92)

But the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian Church of the Oriental rite, faithful to Rome, notes the discontent of her faithful after the meeting in Moscow. “Many Greek Catholics are worried, and to a certain extent indignant that a subject concerning the internal development of our Church has been discussed, not in Kiev, Lviv or Rome, but in Moscow, and what is even more serious, without our participation,” the Ukrainian bishops wrote in a declaration circulated on March 3.

This declaration was signed by Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, leader of the 5 million members who make up this Church, banned by the Soviet authorities for 44 years and which only regained its legal status in 1990.

In February the Russian Orthodox Church published the declarations of all the Orthodox Churches opposed to the establishment of a patriarchy. One of them, from the ecumenical patriarchy of Constantinople, affirmed that a Greco-Catholic patriarchy in the Ukraine would be “an absolutely hostile act to the whole of Orthodoxy”.

Kasper or Husar, Rome will have to choose.