Between suffering and hope” “

A land “that is the cradle of Christianity in eastern Europe” and that “bears written in its history and in the blood of so many of its sons and daughters the call to work with utter dedication at the service of the unity of all Christians”: that’s how John Paul II, in February this year, defined the Ukraine on receiving in audience the members of the permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, accompanied by the archbishop major of Lvov, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar. It is a country in which Catholics have suffered appalling persecutions. Exemplary is the case of metropolitan Josyf Slipyj (1892-1984), imprisoned in the gulag in 1945 and released 18 years later, thanks to the intervention of John XXIII. For centuries the hinge between the great religious and cultural currents of western and eastern Europe, the former Soviet republic was in recent days at the centre of the 25th European Week promoted by the “Paul VI” Ambrosian Week, with the title “Religious history of the Ukraine”. According to the last statistical Yearbook of the Church, the Ukraine has a population of 50,550,000, of whom 60% are Orthodox and over 5.5 million are Catholics; the large majority of the latter are Greco-Catholics of Byzantine rite. There are 17 ecclesiastical circumscriptions and 3,676 parishes. Towards Europe. “The future of the Ukraine, including the success of its option for the West, will be determined by the interaction of three factors: the political class that currently rules the country, the way in which the European West and the USA conceive their own interests and, thirdly, the way in which Russia perceives its own”. So says the historian of Harvard University, Ihor Ševèenko who denounced “the ambiguous position” of the “ nomenklatura in power in Ukraine”, very far removed from the “Western principle of transparency”. But the historian does not spare his criticisms of the West, either, calling it “indifferent” to the “support it should give to Ukraine’s European option”. “The political relations with the European Union and with NATO”, and the aspiration “to the establishment of an autonomous patriarchate”, are, in the view of Cesare Alzati of the University of Pisa, the elements that characterise the Ukraine’s process towards full independence and incorporation in Europe. But, as Ševcenko underlined, “the most urgent challenge is the formation of new political and intellectual elites that look to the West and its values”. The religious revival. “The collapse of the Soviet regime highlighted the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian cultural matrices”. That difference is also reflected in religious outlooks. It results in the fact that “Ukrainian Orthodoxy is clearly distinguished from the rest of the Orthodox world”. The point was made by Oxana Pachlovska, member of the Ukrainian national Academy of Sciences of Kiev and professor of Slav studies at the “La Sapienza” University of Rome. “In a situation in which several Churches co-exist”, he pointed out, it is “the Greco-Catholic Church, together with the autocephalous Orthodox Church, not recognised by the patriarchate of Moscow”, that promotes the formation of “free and responsible individuals, citizens and not subjects, and directly conformable to a democracy of European type”. That’s why “the Ukraine today is a genuine laboratory of the construction of democracy in the Orthodox political and cultural world”. The same view is shared by Borys A. Gudziak, rector of the Theological Academy of the Catholic University of Lvov: “religion is giving proof” in the country “of a new vitality: in my diocese some 700 priests have been ordained in ten years, and over 18,000 students are studying in the theological schools of the Ukraine today; the seminaries are bursting at the seams”. Religion “is, and will continue to be, an important social, cultural and political factor” on condition that “the religious communities are sufficiently attentive to the signs of the time”. “Many citizens nourish the hope – continued Gudziak – that the Churches will be able to give credible responses to the country’s crisis, which is more an ethical than an economic one”. This crisis is expressed in “the widespread corruption, the high rate of abortion”, and the “growing resignation that is spreading among the young” due to unemployment.