Ukrainian people will not fall for attempts to incite religious war in Ukraine, Head of UGCC says
On February 26, in the Residence of Pope Paul VI in Rome, Patriarch Sviatoslav held a round table titled “Ukraine Today: The role of the UGCC in the transformation of Ukrainian society.”
Speaking about the religious and ecumenical situation in Ukraine, His Beatitude Sviatoslav referred to events concerning the unification of Ukrainian Orthodoxy: "The discussion between Moscow and Constantinople is an internal affair of the Orthodox world, we are not party to this process, but I can say with certainty that faithful of different denominations, including Greek Catholics, interpreted Patriarch Bartholomew's gesture as parental care for those who had already been assigned to go to hell as non-canonical.”
“Of course, this gesture not only gave an answer to the questions of the spiritual life of millions of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, but also provoked a certain debate. I want to emphasize that, like the Church, we aspire to build friendly relations with all, but not everyone wants to be our friends,” said His Beatitude Sviatoslav. He stressed that "there are serious attempts to provoke a religious war in Ukraine, but I assure you that the Ukrainian people will not lead this provocation.”
Speaking about the ecumenical movement, Patriarch Sviatoslav recalled the words of St. Pope John Paul II that “Ukraine is a laboratory of ecumenism and the ecumenical movement for us is not a political but a pastoral issue.”
“I am convinced that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which has a local and global dimension due to its unity with the Ecumenical Church, has a special ecumenical mission in Ukraine, but at the same time it is called to show our local church reality to the world,” Patriarch Sviatoslav said.
