Roman Catholics are being offended in Dnipropetrovsk region

The Head of Kharkiv-Zaporizhzhia diocese of Roman Catholic Church, Bishop Stanislav Padevsky applied to the European Ombudsman, the FRG Ambassador to Ukraine and the Pope’s nuncio with an open letter, in which he asks to protect the rights of his coreligionists, who are living in Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Here, in the former colony Yamburg (Dniprove Village now) he reports, the descendants of the Bavarian immigrants, who had established a Catholic community here, have being living in peace with their co-villagers for 200 years. A Church of the Assumption of Jesus Christ was built on the money of their ancestors already at the beginning of the past century in Yamburg and was baptized in 1905. As historical documents prove, the parish consisted of up to 7,000 parishioners, mainly Germen and Poles, who lived in the Yamburg environs. The church functioned after the revolution, until its dean was sent to the Solovky after two arrests and shot there. The church’s building survived through the Second World War and was barbarously ruined in 1985 on the order of the then power. There is an old cemetery near the ruins of the church, whose territory used to belong to the Roman Catholics. The revived community, the bishop explains, honors the sacred place and has being seeking to return the place, where the base of the ruined temple and the mentioned cemetery with co-villagers’ entombments are situated. The local Roman Catholics built there a small cult building — a chapel. However, on the eve of Christmas unknown people “ruined its walls and destructed the roof” at night.

“This, without any exaggeration, barbarian act,” it is stated in the open letter, “is a dishonor to the Roman Catholics’ religious feelings, not only the residents of Dniprove Village, but the overall Kharkiv-Zaporizhzhia diocese. The community of Dniprove Catholics, mainly having German origins, interprets the attack of the newly-built temple as a restriction of the German National Minority’s rights, for they do not have any other cult building.” Besides, the bishop thinks that the reason for ruining the temple could be the desire of the local private structure to intimidate the village residents, who prevent it from possessing the land, situated on the Dnipro River’s bank. A fence has already been constructed there, which fences off a part of the area. The bishop also notifies that he had applied to the Head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast State Administration Nadiya Deieva and asked her to protect the Roman Catholic Community’s interests. However, the priest received “an exclusively formal answer,” and the chapel was attacked afterwards.

“Unfortunately,” the bishop states in his letter, “all this is a proof of the power’s negative attitude to the Catholics and national minorities.” He considers that the refusal given to the Dnipropetrovsk community, who has been seeking for many years to return the Roman Catholic church in the center of the city, which had been illegally privatized by Petro Laxarenko’s structures, is the most characteristic example of this tendency. The question concerning the returning of the church has been many times raised by the Polish president Kwasniewski and Vatican representatives before the Ukrainian statesmen, but all in vain. Bishop Padevsky admits that in such a way the laws and the Constitution of Ukraine are violated, which guarantee the right for performing religious cults within the premises, specially designed for that.