Your Eminences, Your Graces, Dear brother Bishops beloved in God!
The Council for which we
have gathered aims to strike a balance of the previous year, to set tasks and to
define priorities of our work for the coming year. The main figures reflecting the process of
development of our Church will be represented in the report of the Executive
Administrator of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Instead I would like to focus
upon the quality aspects of this process, at the same time setting tasks we
have to continue fulfilling in future.
First of all it concerns
the role that the Church plays in the life of every individual and the society
on the whole. The Ukrainian society remains extremely secular as a result of
the decades-long atheistic propaganda. But the people still experience spiritual thirst. Nevertheless it is not so easy to find for a modern man the well with pure water of
the true faith where he could quench his thirst. In the modern Ukraine the
person coming to God may encounter many charismatic movements on his way, who,
hiding behind the name of Christ propose different spiritual substitutes. The growth of charismatic movements
of protestant trend in Ukraine is a real challenge
both for the Ukrainian society and for the Orthodox Church as well.
Taking this into account
the missionary service of the Church - what is often called the internal
mission. This kind of mission calls for continuous witness for Christ and his
true doctrine to those our fellow-countrymen who, belonging formally to the
Church and are Christians in name, do not live ecclesiastic life and do not
realize what is to be a Christian.
In order to get the
salutary doctrine over to the people at large, the Church needs corresponding
resources. In particular they are the mass-media. It should be noted however that our Church
becomes more conspicuous in the newspapers, magazines, TV. We try to actively employ
the secular mass-media. The church mass-media undergo qualitative changes. They
become more informative, interesting, and meet the expectations of the readers
and viewers.
To the more extent than the
mass-media the Church in its mission has to employ its traditional resources. First
of all it should rely on the pastoral service of its clergymen. For that the
priests are to have the quality education, to be able to express the eternal
Christian truth in the language understandable for modern people. Training of
pastors and of those who assist them is one of our highest priorities. The
previous year we also had worked to improve the situation with theological
education in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. We achieved some success, in
particular, having appointed the new rector of the most eminent theological
schools of our Church- the theological schools of Kyiv. However our theological
schools still confront lots of challenges. In particular it is their changing
over to such a pattern when the seminary gives higher theological education,
and the academy, due to its specialisation, gives the possibility of carrying out the scientific
research theological activity, prepare high-level teachers and researchers. It is impossible to achieve without
training of the new teaching staff, who received the education not only in the
native seminary and academy but also in the other educational establishments,
including the foreign ones.
The special task for the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church is taking care of the Ukrainian Orthodox diaspora.
Statistically from the beginning of 90-ties of the previous century more than 7
million of our fellow-countrymen left the country in search of good luck, the most part of which
are Orthodox. Staying abroad
the face many difficulties, first of all of spiritual and psychological
character and require pastoral assistance and support. Since among the
Ukrainian immigrants prevail the natives of Western and Central regions, which belong
to the Ukrainian culture and consider Ukrainian to be their native language
there is an extreme need of the Ukrainian priests abroad. The Ukrainian
Orthodox Church tackles this complex pastoral problem together with the
Department fro the External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. We
hope that in this activity we will have the assistance of our country and of the
diplomatic missions of Ukraine abroad.
We denote with pleasure the
fact that the principles on which our cooperation with the government is based
become more distinct. This cooperation now depends on personal preferences and
dislikes of a certain politician to the lesser extent then before. We stand for the relations built on the law and not on
emotions. Only under such conditions the Church can exist and perform its
salutary mission regardless of what political force gets into power. It is from
the point of view of existing legal norms, including the European ones, to
which Ukraine orientates itself, the Church has right to be the legal entity,
to expect the restitution of the church property, confiscated by the atheistic
power, as well as the right to teach the bases of its doctrine without
obstacles at schools.
We hope that the new
government, which has been recently elected by the Supreme Rada of Ukraine,
will adhere to the principles explicated above. We are also looking forward to the
fruitful cooperation with the government in the domains where the Church and
the state are always partners - in the domain of social assistance, of taking
care of the weaker. I believe that both the church and the state power are
interested in strengthening of the spiritual basis of the society. And it is
possible first of all by way of cooperation in the field of education.
I'd like to consider in
more detail some dangerous tendencies in the internal life of our Church. In
particular, it is the activity of some Orthodox brotherhoods and para-church public organisations which
sometimes politicize the ecclesiastic life and even act on the part of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church without corresponding empowerment. From the history of our Church we
know that the Orthodox brotherhoods were created for assisting bishops to
preserve the Orthodox faith. Once the brotherhoods had played a very important
part in preserving the Orthodoxy. But the fight of brotherhoods in difficult
periods of forcing on the Union was the fight for faith and not for the
political slogans. That is the main difference of those brotherhoods from the
present movements that gamble on political subjects. The so-called political
Orthodoxy on the part of which some politicians act is a very dangerous thing,
which averts people from the Orthodoxy, inherited from the fathers of the Church.
It whips up the political passions, provokes disobedience to the hierarchy, and
introduces discord into the Church.
I emphasize that our Church
is beyond politics. It unites the people with different political preferences.
The only thing it demands is that different political views should not prevent
people to communicate in Christ, and should not disturb the Church peace. We
learnt from our own experience that the attempts of introducing some or another
secular ideology inside the Church inevitably led to schisms. I ask the members
of the Holy Council to explain in their dioceses the harmfulness of
politicizing the church life, and to stop timely those who try to introduce
discord on the basis of political gambling.
And yet the greatest
trouble of the Church life remains the schism. The tragedy of schism of the
Ukrainian Orthodoxy stands in line with the other great tragedies our people
survived during throughout the XX century: the civil war, political
repressions, Holodomor, the events of the World War II, resulting in millions
of deaths of our fellow-countrymen, as well as severe persecutions of faith,
compared by their scope with the persecutions of the Church by the pagan
emperors in the early Christian epoch.
The tragedy and absurdity
of the present scission is worsened by the fact that it is not the doctrine
that separates us, since we confess the same faith, and not the nationality,
since we are sons and daughters of the same people. We are separated by the
egotism of some political leaders and the interference of some political
forces. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is not alien to the citizens of our
state. In its human dimension it is flesh from flesh of our people. In the
divine dimension it is the real Body of Christ which is the source of eternal
salvation for anyone who joins it. We appeal everyone to such reunion.
At the same time we
understand how difficult it is to make steps towards each other. We also
realize that these steps should not be unilateral. Therefore we have to look for the
ways of overcoming schism together. It implies mutual evaluation of what was
going on to our Church and society during past decades - evaluation within the framework of
meetings, dialogues and concrete affairs which would bring us closer together.
Today the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church conducts a dialogue with the "Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox
Church". It is important that this dialogue
started on the initiative of the "UAOC" the adherents of which realized the futility and hopelessness of the
further staying beyond the Church fold. With pleasure I can state the advance of mutual
understanding and I call both the faithful of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox
Church and those who are not in the blessed communion with the Universal
Orthodox Church, to treat each other without enmity. Let's remember the commandment
of our Saviour: "By
this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to
another." (John 13: 35). We also do not resign the hope of return of our brothers and
sisters who are in the "Kievan Patriarchate".
So, to sum it up I can say
that one of the major tasks in the foreseeable future is finding the ways to
the shortest overcoming of schism and to the renewal of unity of the Orthodoxy
in Ukraine. The question of the internal mission is still of the highest
priority. It refers both to the missionary work on returning of people from the
sects, from charismatic ones first of all, and the task of evangelization of
those Christians who are Orthodox in name only. We must expend our efforts not
only to the construction of new temples, but also to the care of temples of the
human souls. This work should be conducted both in the borders of Ukraine and
beyond them - among the Ukrainian diaspora. To set up shortly the task of our
Church at the present historical stage, it consists in fulfilling the
commandment of Christ the Saviour that there should be one flock and one pastor
(John 10: 16). | |
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