Pope Will Spend Five Days in Ukraine Instead of Four
As announced by the Apostolic Nunciature in Kyiv, the schedule for Pope John Paul II visit has been slightly changed: the trip will start on June 23 and end on June 27, 2001. This became known after the Roman cathedra delegation headed by Father Roberto Tucci arrived to Ukraine. According to Apostolic Nuncio to Ukraine Nikola Eterovic, the final date for the visit has been coordinated with representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and the Ukrainian government.
The reasons why Papal visit will be prolonged are not reported but are quite obvious: numerous Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic communities send messages to the Vatican and turned to the church offices in Kyiv and Lviv requesting the rout and program for the visit be expanded. For example, Pope is invited to attend holy places in Zarvanytsia, visit Zaporizhzhia oblast, legendary Hortytsia Island, and many other places in Ukraine.
Simultaneously, as Polish Gazeta Wyborcza cites the Vatican’s Fides Information Agency, the Moscow Patriarchy has not abandoned its intent to block the Papal visit to Ukraine. With this purpose, according to Fides, Moscow Patriarch Aleksiy II entrusted primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) Metropolitan Volo dymyr to send a letter to the Pope setting out substantive objections to the planned visit.
One does not have to be a seer to guess that all this is about those same “catastrophic consequences,” with which Moscow Patriarchate has been intimidating Ukrainian society for a long time. What exactly is all this about? What Egyptian punishments are to be expected and for what? The worst thing that can be expected is a crowd of outraged “brethren” from the UPC (MP) in the streets of Kyiv (they would not dare to go to Lviv). Strange things, however, occur in this eastern world of ours, because what right does Moscow Patriarch have to interfere in our internal affairs? Have they forgotten in Moscow that Pope John Paul II was invited not only by the Ukrainian Catholics (who, by the way, have every right to do so), but also by Ukraine’s president, cabinet, and parliament? What courage it must take to make such an indelicate and, to be blunt, unceremonious and obtrusive, intervention? Imagine how a person would react to a neighbor entering his house uninvited and beginning to categorically dictate whom the master should invite to his living room and whom he should not under any circumstances.
For this author the coming visit has, among all, such an important meaning that when it happens our country will have one problem less: there will be no more need to dispute without end, take offense, to frighten, protest, as people simultaneously realize the medieval idiocy of what is happening now.
