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Will He Really Come?

16 February, 00:00

By Vitaly PORTNYKOV, The Day The report on Pope John Paul II's probable visit to Ukraine later this year is so far treated as protocol news. True, there are not so many Roman Catholics in Ukraine, while Greek Catholics are known to be concentrated in western regions, so the visit of the Roman pontiff is unlikely to trigger massive celebrations. But this is true only at first glance. For the Pope's sojourn in Kyiv will be of a historic, not merely protocol nature. Ukraine will encounter a great personality: unlike other great personalities about whom you may read in books: John Paul II is a man in flesh and blood, a man able to turn a visit of the Vatican's head of state into a true mission of a priest worried about the problems of humanity. It is not a political or religious show, it is a special world outlook, and it is very important for Ukraine to be a territory where people are known to understand and respect this outlook.

It is also worthy of note that, apart from the Pope's Baltic sojourns, this will be his first visit to the post-Soviet territory. John Paul II dreamed of visiting Russia whose leaders - first Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin - invited him, but the Moscow Patriarchate had always opposed such visits. This is obvious: if Patriarch Alexei II deigns to send birthday greetings to President Yeltsin on a par with none other than Premier Yevgeny Primakov and Presidential Chief of Staff Nikolai Bordiuzha, why should he have in Moscow the Pope who may not even know who Bordiuzha is? I am not, of course, going to minimize all this. The serious reader will understand how complex the relations between the Vatican and the Moscow Patriarchate are, but the state of these relations today is objectively conducive to the papal trip to Ukraine. There are not so many people of this caliber left in our time of expediency. We need to see him.

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№6, (1999)

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