Roman Catholics in Sevastopol Organize Picket Demanding Return of Church Building

Before the beginning of the session of the Sevastopol City Council on May 5, 20 believers of the Roman Catholic Church organized a picket demanding to pass the building of the Sevastopol Friendship Cinema House to their community to be used as a church. 

The picket was triggered by new that a deputy Vasyl Zelenchuk is going to submit the question of the transfer of the cinema house to the Catholics to the consideration of the session. Zelenchuk stated that he did not make such a statement and that the draft decision regarding the church is being currently considered by special committees of the city council.

The head of the City Council, Yurii Doinikov, stated to journalists that the “Catholic” question will be considered at the June session, which is to be attended by Consul General of Poland in Sevastopol Vieslav Mazur.  

“Vieslav Mazur wished to participate in the session. I have arranged for it. I think it is connected with the question of the church. He could not be present at this session according to the time limits stipulated by our regulations and he will attend the session in June,” said Doinikov, religion.in.ua reported.  

In September 2011, representatives of the City Council stated that they were ready to return the church if its value was fully reimbursed to the council. 

The Roman Catholics maintain that they want to get back what was theirs as the church was built in 1911 at the expense of Sevastopol Catholics and was later confiscated.

As RISU reported earlier, in December 2009, the Roman Catholic parish of St. Clement in Sevastopol made a repeated appealed to the city council with to have the church returned where a cinema has been located since the war. On December 24, 2009, the senior priest of the church, Fr. Yurii, held a press conference on the problem.

"The essence of our request to the authorities to return the church is simply to restore justice, both social and civic, for if there are successors, parishioners and the church, a religious building, a holy place for part of the Sevastopol community, why not return it?” According to the priest, “an idea was voiced a few times that there was no church, that only ruins were left, and the cinema was built on the foundations thereof after the war. But this is not true,” said the priest.

According to Fr. Yurii, the issue was “being settled” for 12 years. “First of all, there was the following manipulation: before the mid-1990s the church was owned by the state and the state administration had the prerogative in the question of returning it,” noted the priest.  But the “officials did not have the guts to use their powers and return the church to the Sevastopol Catholics. They did transfer it, but in a very strange, still not completely understood way: allegedly to communal ownership, the settlement of the issue having been entrusted in the deputies of the city council,” added the priest.

According to UNIAN, the minister stressed “The question was not even included in the agenda of the city council session of October 2009 and we received a response that our request was not supported by the deputies and that it remains expedient to use the Friendship Cinema, meaning that our church is still like a cinema.”