'Russkiy Mir' - The 'Russian world' meets Ukrainian politics and Vatican diplomacy www.pillarcatholic.com Anatolii Babynskyi, 03.03.2022
sitat:During a 2009 visit to Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow described in a sermon Ukrainian Greek Catholics as people who tried “to change people's lives by force, to change their culture, their faith, their national identity.”
Kirill’s point was clear: Ukrainian culture and identity belongs to the “Russian world,” and Ukrainian Greek Catholics have interfered with that.
Not wanting to resolve mutual historical disagreements with the Ukrainian Greek Catholics directly, the Moscow Patriarchate has sought to solve its problem with the hands of the Vatican.
Since the 1990s, almost all efforts of the ROC in the Catholic-Orthodox dialog were focused on the solution of “the uniate question” — namely, the ecclesiological and cultural problems posed for the ROC by the existence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Taking advantage of the Vatican’s desire to continue dialoguing with the Russian Church, the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate aimed to push the Vatican toward a return to the situation pre-1989, when the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was officially banned in the USSR and existed after 1946 only in the underground and in the diaspora.
After the annexation of Crimea, and on the eve of the visit of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin to Moscow in 2017, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeev, who is effectively the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Moscow Patriarchate, once again reiterated that “the most painful problem in relations between our Churches is the Union, which has been causing serious harm to Orthodox-Catholic relations in general for centuries.”
[ed. note: “the Union” refers to the Union of Brest, the 1596 decision which created the Ukrainian Catholic Church.]
