Eastern Europe" "
After a century of “terror and traumas”, as was the twentieth, characterized among other things by a “deliberate religious persecution” and by “forced deportations” of the population, Christianity in the Ukraine has passed from the ‘”euphoria” of the post-Wall period, with the consequent entry into the Western processes of “globalization” (and the imbalances due to belated change) to a situation that opens “a scenario of great hope and expectation, but also of tremendous anxiety and fear”. That’s how Borys Gudziak, rector of the Theological Academy and of the Catholic University of Lvov, describes the “scenario” in which the religious faith of the young is placed today. But a “large majority” of the young are, he says, “open to the experience of the faith”. The “challenges” for the faith. Gudziak subdivides Ukrainian youth into three categories, in their attitude to the faith: believers (54%), non-believers (28%) and those who “are unable to define their own status” (18%). Of the believers, 79% are Orthodox, 9% Catholics and 7% of other Christian denominations. The believers and the non-believers, he stresses, “have more or less the same priorities in values: happiness in family life, success in career, freedom and independence in taking their own decisions”. Religious practice is generally low: 6% of the young regularly attend the community to which they belong, 32% occasionally, 46% rarely and 16% not at all. The greatest “challenge” that Christianity needs to tackle, according to Gudziak, is that posed by the emigration of an ever growing number of Ukrainians to the countries of Western Europe: “young people forced to leave their own homes and families, illegal immigration, demographic crisis”, all factors that lead the new generations to conclude that there are “no prospects for them” in the Ukraine. The spiritual life, in this context, is “regarded with suspicion” by the young, or at the most “admired but considered remote and implausible”. Faith and “credibility”. Hence the responsibility, for the local Church, to “make its own voice heard in society”, and to be able to transmit to the young a credible message, “of quality”, free of “hypocrisy” or “pious moralism”. Restoring “faith” to a people that has a need for a profound “spiritual maturation”, to put behind them the tragic events of the past and the difficulties of the present: this is the other task considered urgent for the Ukrainian ecclesial community, characterized by a flowering of vocations that may seem paradoxical, if compared with the persecutions that belong to the country’s recent history. Seminaries that are “full” to bursting point, religious life with an average age of less than thirty: this situation, concludes Gudziak, may be an “encouragement” for young people, an encouragement that is given by “courageous witnesses” and founded on the “personal meeting” with Christ: the young have a need for persons, “spiritual guides” who may “teach them to pray” and give them “credible responses to the questions of life. Christianity is not an academic exercise. Concepts and ideas form an important aspect of the spiritual life, but in the end what’s fundamental is a personal relationship”.
