www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Pope to visit Ukraine in 2012; Moscow patriarchate cool toward pl

The Church always speaks in code, Father. Inscrutability is often used to mask a lack of profundity.

Sometimes one encounters profound superficialty!

Fr. Serge

Forgive me but you misunderstand father. Perhaps I could have worded it better.

Most of Byzantine Catholics live in western Ukraine and are clearly a minority in the whole country. I doubt you or anyone else would dispute this father.

It is also rather interesting that the same people who are so supportive of the Pope's visit heartily opposed the visit of His Holiness Patriarch Kiril who's canonical territory Ukraine actually is, at least until the UOC is granted autocephaly.

And it's not just the Mormons. A few years ago I had the privilege of speaking with a lady who had adopted a girl from an orphanage in Ukraine. True, it was a state orphanage, but resources were scant and conditions were deplorable. While she was waiting for the adoption to be finalized, she observed a group of Evangelical missionaries from the USA, offering to donate much-needed supplies. The orphanage didn't want to take them, but what could they do? For the children's sake they had to accept them.

Undoubtedly, an event like this only helped to confirm in the Evangelicals' minds that Ukraine is indeed a missionary field!


Peace,
Deacon Richard

Well, going by figures for attendance in Easter Services, more Ukrainians (10.9 million) in Ukraine attended Church than did Russians in Russia (8 million)on Easter; quite astonishing given Russia's and Ukraine's relative populations.

Add to this that the areas in Ukraine with the highest Church attendance were those of the Ukainian Catholic heartland (Lviv: (1.6 million); Zakarpattia (790,000), Ternopil (700,000), and one could reasonably assume Ivano-Frankivsk oblast's attendance equivalent to Ternopil's, than one could assume that the heartland of Ukrainian Catholicism's numerical output is equal to Half! of the entire Easter church-going population in Russia.

http://risu.org.ua/en/index/all_news/culture/religious_holidays/35131/

Ukrainian Catholics may be a minority, but the oblasts in which they are concentrated are among the most religious. A very vocal minority and a sizable proportion of all active Ukrainian religious. No wonder Moscow tried so hard not to lose Halych. And if it were to lose Ukraine too, so much for the Moscow as Third Rome.

The question is also why does the Patriarch of Moscow feel it important to change a name of a street such as Mazepa in Ukraine's captital Kyiv. He is now in effect telling Ukrainians in their independent nation what to call their roads. He might moan at Mazepa, but says nothing at all of the communist streets Leninskaya, Dzherdzhinskaya, KarlMarx, etc. No objections to streets named after these communist killers. No he focuses on Mazepa.
http://www.risu.org.ua/en/index/all_news/state/national_religious_question/36039