Yesterday’s "kulaks”, today’s youth” “

That of being a “laboratory” of communion and working “with all its strength” at the service of the cause of unity: that’s the vocation of the Ukraine (50 million inhabitants, of whom just over 8% Greek-Catholics), a frontier land between East and West of Europe, according to John Paul II . The Pope stressed the country’s key role on receiving in audience in recent days the members of the permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, archbishop of Lvov. “You – said the Holy Father – come from a land that is the cradle of Christianity in eastern Europe. Ukraine bears, written in its history and in the blood of its many martyrs, the vocation to work with all its strength for the cause of the unity of all Christians”. To the role of the Ukraine, as a vital “hinge” between East and West, the Sturzo Institute dedicated a round table in Rome in recent days, with the title: “The Polish-Ukrainian University between history and future of Central and Eastern Europe”. The Polish-Ukrainian University. Promoted in 2000 by the State and Catholic Universities of Lublin, the universities of Kiev and Lvov and the Mohyljana Academy in Lvov, it is “at the present time a Polish university with its seat in Lublin, but is also attended by many students from the Ukraine; the idea is to turn it into an international university, a kind of ‘College of Europe’ in Eastern Europe”, explained Jerzy Kloczowski, of the Institute of Central and Eastern Europe at Lublin which, in collaboration with UNESCO and the international Committee of Historical Sciences, has begun a project for the revision of Ukrainian historiography. “The Ukraine, mother of Christianity in Eastern Europe, – he continues – has been for centuries the bridge between Latin and Slav Europe” and through “this new institution our aim is to revive and deepen the meeting between the two souls of Europe, and to give the young the chance to engage in an open and unprejudiced dialogue”. A dialogue that must especially be based on “an intimate knowledge of the history of the Ukraine, of the price paid by its population to gain its own freedom and independence, because the fundamental reasons for its appeal to Europe lie in this reality”, pointed out the president of the Sturzo Institute, the historian Gabriele De Rosa. And, in elucidating this history, light needs to be shed, in particular – he said – on the “‘Stalinist famine’ artificially generated in the country, a genocide that reached its climax in the years 1932-33, perpetrated by the state police through the arrest and summary execution of hundreds of thousands of ‘kulaks’ (peasants), the deportation of two million families, and the death from privation of over three million people”, of which “the first data were brought to light only in the 1990s”. To this end, an “Historical Committee for Central and Eastern Europe”, a centre of cooperation between Italian, Ukrainian and Polish researchers, has recently been set up at the Sturzo Institute. A cultural “polyphony”. “It’s the disputes of the past that still inflame spirits and continue to divide the Ukrainian and Polish peoples”, said the science professor and Ukrainian MP Mykola Zhulynskij. “But what unites us in the religious and cultural field is deeper than any factor of division. We must never forget the prayer of the Pope who, in the Mass celebrated in Lvov during his visit in June 2001 prayed to the Virgin Mary as follows: ‘Help the Ukrainians never to forget their name and never to lose their identity”‘. But what are the essential features of the Ukrainian identity? And what does it mean to be citizens of Eastern Europe? “It’s a life-style – sums up Maria Zubrytska, pro-rector of the State University of Lvov – characterized by a strong religious sense, by the refusal to accept the separation between Eastern and Western Europe, and by a cultural ‘polyphony’ that leads to an almost aesthetic sensibility for other cultures, while at the same time maintaining the country’s own identity”.