Birds sit on a cross of the Cave Monastery in Kiev March 5, 2007.
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Ukrainian Orthodox bid for unified patriarchate
Posted on Thu Mar 08 2007
Kiev, Mar. 8, 2007 (CWNews.com) - Petro Yushchenko, the brother of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko, has taken the lead of an organization known as A National Church for Ukraine. The group’s aim is to re-unite the country’s splintered Orthodox communities. “This organization aims to unite the efforts of society, of all Orthodox faithful,” said Archimandrite Yevstratii Zoria, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kiev patriarchate, one of the three groups competing for the claim to represent the Orthodox faithful of the country.
A spokesman for a contending group, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow patriarchate, expressed misgivings about the new initiative. He said that representatives of his group had not been invited to the inaugural meeting of Petro Yushchenko’s lay organization, and said that A National Church for Ukraine is “just another attempt of the Kiev patriarchate to get closer to the government.” The Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow patriarchate, which retains close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, has consistently charged that the independent Kiev patriarchate relies on support from the government.
The call for support for a single Orthodox body in Ukraine presents a new challenge for the country’s Eastern-rite Catholic leadership. Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, the Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, has suggested in the past that all of the Eastern churches in Ukraine should unite in a single Ukrainian patriarchate.
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