The faith of a people” “

“Today finally the government no longer raises obstacles to the pastoral activity of our Church. We have 21 eparchies (dioceses) and 30 bishops in the country: a result that would have been unimaginable ten years ago”. Bishop STANISLAV PADEWSKI of Kharkiv-Zaposirhia has expressed moderate satisfaction about the present situation of the Church in his country in a briefing to SIR. At the same time he does not disguise the daunting effort of evangelization that still awaits the Ukrainian Church, which emerged from clandestine existence only fourteen years ago. According to the last statistical handbook of the Catholic Church, out of a population of roughly 51 million, 60% of them Orthodox, there are over five and a half million Catholics, 3,761 Catholics parishes and some 2,700 priests in the former Soviet Republic. WITNESS OF FAITH. Memories of the religious persecutions of the Soviet regime, which ruled the eastern zone of Ukraine for 70 and the Western zone for 45 years, were revived at a meeting at the Pontifical Theresianum University, where a young Ukrainian religious, PAVLO VYSHVSKYY, recently graduated in spiritual theology with a dissertation on “The witness of faith of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine during the Communist persecution”. “An act of recognition to those who defended the Catholic faith in spite of the brutal persecutions suffered”: this, explained Vyshvskyy, was the basic motivation of the research he conducted for his doctoral dissertation. Through the testimonies “of numerous priests who had suffered imprisonment in Soviet gulags, of sisters threatened and of laypeople persecuted”, reconstructed either on the basis of archival sources or, where possible, on personal meetings, the aim of the research was to “be the mouthpiece of those who were reduced to silence during the 70 years of Communism”. PASTORAL COMMITMENT. “Of that courageous Church Father Pavlo, whom I have known since he was a child – said Msgr. Padewski -, is the symbol and fruit because he expresses the strength and the maturity of the faith preserved, in spite of harassment, by his parents and transmitted to him, as happened in numerous Ukrainian families”. The bishop then pointed out that “the pastoral commitment of the Church in the country remains intensive today, in particular with the aim of leading believers to the substance of the faith”. “With regard to the sacraments – he explained by way of example – there’s still a low level of knowledge and awareness of their deep significance in Ukraine. Often people take the sacraments by grasping more the aspects linked to tradition and, in some sense, the ‘folklore’ of gestures and rites than the essence and truth of the faith that they represent and express”. The bishop described other motives for the pastoral commitment of the Church, including the “great distances that represent an element of dispersal” and “lack of homogeneity” in the former Soviet Republic: “While from a geographical point of view the Ukraine is a single country, in actual fact, in customs and people’s needs, there are huge differences between the various regions of which account needs to be taken. My eparchy, on the frontier with Russia, presents one of the highest percentages of Orthodox believers in the country”. UNIVERSAL CHURCH. According to Msgr. VITALIJ SKOMAROWSKI, vicar general of Kyiv-Zhytomyr and rector of the Theological Seminary, “after a long period of isolation and clandestine life, Ukrainian Catholics, by opening themselves to the dimension of ‘catholicity’, can finally ‘profit’ from the patrimony of the universal Church and harvest its fruits”. The bishop emphasized in this regard “the close links of many Ukrainian parishes with the Catholic community of Colorado Springs in the USA. Each year – he explained – twinning arrangements are made between parishes; an exchange of ideas and experiences that enrich both”. What is the role of the laity in the Ukrainian Church? “They are gradually discovering their own identity, but they still have a long way to go. There’s still a great deal of work to be done in terms of education and formation in this sense”. “Cradle of Christianity in Eastern Europe”, as recalled at the Theresianum, and “frontier land between Eastern and Western Europe, for centuries considered a ‘periphery’ of Poland or Russia – continued Skomarowski -, the Ukraine has always felt herself to be part of Europe and aspires to be re-admitted to what it considers a community of peoples that share a common heritage of civilization, democracy and, especially, Christian values that represent the continent’s roots and its bulwarks for the future”. THE HOLOMODOR. To commemorate the victims (almost four million) of the Holomodor, the terrible famine engineered by Stalin between 1932 and 1933 to break the will of the Ukrainian people and bend them to forced collectivization, the archbishop major of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, Cardinal LUBOMYR HUSAR, will preside over a solemn requiem mass in the church of the Basilian Fathers in Rome on Sunday, 30 October.