front page" "
The Latin-rite Church has been permanently present on Ukrainian territory since the 11th century. Its organization, with its own hierarchy and ecclesiastical structure, took shape from the 14th century. The creation of the first Catholic diocese dates to this period. The Latin-rite Church was persecuted from the 17th century, during the period of the Orthodox Tsar, to the 20th century, under the Communist regime. John Paul II, in his apostolic visit to Ukraine from 23 to 27 June 2001, raised 27 witnesses of the faith to the honours of the altars. These Blesseds are only a very small proportion of the Ukrainian Christians who were swallowed up by the Soviet gulags during the 20th century; who will probably never be involved in any process of canonization; and whose very names are now difficult to trace. We are dealing here not with the history of a few courageous Christians, but of the martyrdom of a whole people. It is calculated that 17 million people met with a violent death in the USSR in the 20th century, in particular due to their witness to the Christian faith. In 1937, in fact, officially, there did not exist any religious communities of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine due to a programme of mass destruction. In my parish of Bar alone, in the Vinnitza region, 9,439 faithful of the Roman Catholic Church were killed during the persecution. Despite the Communist persecution, which persisted till 1991, the Catholic Church, like a miraculous plant that survives in any century and in any climate, overcame the dangers to which it was exposed and today, in Ukraine, it is enjoying a period of renewal and faith. The ecclesial administration is being renewed: dioceses and parish communities are being reorganized, priests and religious involved in pastoral work, and new vocations born. People are being brought back to Christ and to the Church: a Church that is, finally, no longer the “Church of the catacombs and of silence”; now she can speak out more freely. Persecutions and atheist ideology failed to quench in the faithful the desire for faith, spiritual life and religious worship. The Ukrainian people, with last year’s “Orange” revolution, expressed a great yearning for freedom and independence, and especially testified that Ukraine, with its history and its roots, belongs to Europe, believes in European unity and is committed to the continuing process of unification. Just as it important that the people be not alone in this aspiration, but be supported by the European Community as a whole (because the more people express this desire, the more Russia will make it difficult), so it is to be hoped that the Church of the West will not ignore the history and presence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine, formed of some two million faithful, but support her in the difficulties posed by the current return to freedom: for example, in getting back the churches confiscated by the Soviet government and still not restored to her; in cooperating in the field of the mass media; in helping to establish faculties of theology in Ukrainian territory; and in devoting study to the persecution of Catholics in the USSR.
