Showing posts with label Pope Francis incomprehension Ukraine Russia academia.edu Sviato-slav Shevchuk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pope Francis incomprehension Ukraine Russia academia.edu Sviato-slav Shevchuk. Show all posts

Monday, June 29, 2015

Historic meeting between Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox head 'getting closer'


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A member of the congregartion lights a candle during a midnight mass vigil at the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad's 'Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God and the Royal Martyrs' Church in London

The meeting would be a significant step towards healing the 1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity

An historic meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church is "getting closer every day," a senior Orthodox prelate said in an interview published on 28 June.
The unprecedented meeting would be a significant step towards healing the 1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity, which split in the Great Schism of 1054.
"Now such a meeting is getting closer every day but it must be well prepared," Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church's foreign relations department, said in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper.


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 He said the meeting between the head of the 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic Church and the head of Russian Orthodox Church - which counts some 165 million of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians - would take place in a "neutral" country, not in Moscow or the Vatican. Austria or Hungary were possibilities, he said.Hilarion, one of the most influential people in world Orthodoxy, said he could not say if the meeting could take place as early as this year, but there was currently "a good dynamic" between the two Churches.
One of the biggest bones of contention is the fate of many church properties that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin confiscated from Eastern Rite Catholics, who worship in an Orthodox rite but owe their allegiance to Rome. (Getty Images) One of the biggest bones of contention is the fate of many church properties that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin confiscated from Eastern Rite Catholics, who worship in an Orthodox rite but owe their allegiance to Rome. (Getty Images)
Francis told reporters on the plane returning from a trip to Turkey last year that he had sent word to Kirill that he was willing to meet the Russian patriarch "wherever you want, you call me and I'll come".
The Russian Orthodox Church has accused Catholics of using their new freedoms of religion following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to try to convert people from the Orthodox, a charge the Vatican has denied.
Read more: Putin keeps Pope waiting for over an hour
Vladimir Putin: 'There is no need to fear Russia'
Ukraine prepares for 'full-scale Russian invasion along border'
One of the biggest bones of contention is the fate of many church properties that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin confiscated from Eastern Rite Catholics, who worship in an Orthodox rite but owe their allegiance to Rome.
Stalin gave the property to the Russian Orthodox Church but after the fall of communism, Eastern Rite Catholics took back many church properties, mostly in western Ukraine.


REUTERS

Sunday, November 9, 2014

From Russia the anti-family poison spread, and now from Russia comes the antidote

By Gabriele Kuby

Twenty-five years ago, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still holding its conventions in the Kremlin under the iconic hammer and sickle, no one would have dreamed what would happen there on September 10 and 11, 2014: Inside the Kremlin, the heart of Russia, a two-day international conference was held with the title “Large Families and the Future of Humanity” — pro-life, pro-family, aiming to protect the moral foundation of family and society. 

 

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Powerful, influential people were on the podium: Patriarch Cyril, primate of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), his foreign affairs representative Metropolitan Hilarion; the grand mufti and chief rabbi of the Russian Federation; Elena Mizulina, chair of the Russian parliament’s Federal Assembly of the Committee of Family, Women and Children, sponsor of the law on “protection of children from information negating traditional family values”; Oligarch Vladimir Yakunin, confidant of President Putin, and his wife Natalia Yakunina, both chair of the Andrew the First Called foundation, who is the official organizer of the Forum; Konstantin Malofeev, chair of the St. Basil the Great foundation. Sharing the podium were high-level politicians from Hungary, France, Nigeria, Greece and the Philippines. President Putin sent a greeting, and Archbishop Paglia, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, sent a video message. Attendees included more than a thousand people from all parts of Russia and from 50 countries around the world — many were key players in the current culture wars.

The people in the hall certainly don’t agree on Putin’s behavior in the Ukraine conflict. They do agree, however, that we are in a global anthropological crisis that is attacking the nature and identity of the human person, and they share the same determination to rise against it.

The topic here was not simply the family, but large families, because they can reverse the demographic crisis that threatens the future of Russia, not to mention that of most countries in the West. However, here the problem and its causes were put out in the open: U. S. journalist Donald Feder, advisor to the World Congress of Families and a wise, practicing Jew, said, a false perception of sexuality is the cause of the demographic crisis, specifically the idea that sexuality is for enjoyment only and must have no consequences.
On the contrary, sexuality’s foremost purpose is the creation of human life in the bond of love between man and woman. Because pills and condoms cannot always obstruct this creative force, we kill 50 million unborn children around the world every year. And we continue to do so despite the obviously menacing consequences, because we have a false concept not only of sexuality, but also of freedom. This false freedom knows nothing but the autonomous, commitment-free, self-defined individual, fed by gender ideology that denies God and nature.

After a buffet, at which no one would have noticed that Russia is starting to suffer under its own agricultural sanctions, there was a spectacular show among the Kremlin’s three cathedrals. The golden onion domes lit up in the evening sun, the play of light added enchantment to the facades, and choirs, dancers and singers celebrated life and homeland.

The second day’s enormous program took place in the conference rooms of Christ the Savior Cathedral, the “St. Peter’s Basilica” of the Russian Orthodox church. In 1931, Stalin had the cathedral leveled and replaced with a public swimming pool. It was reopened for the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ.

Parliamentarian Olga Batalina spoke about the successes of Russian family policy: Improved parenting skills, a ban on abortion advertising, extending the abortion waiting time to a week, and offers of counseling and assistance during this time. There is also a generous state subsidy for the second child. And the five-year results? Thirty percent fewer orphans, an increase in the birth rate from 1.3 to 1.7 children per woman during the same period.

Leaders of the international pro-life and pro-family movement gave 10-minute presentations. It would have been interesting to hear something from the Chinese representative about their country’s one-child policy, but that might have been inopportune.

In fact, for any person from Western countries it was inopportune to speak at this Forum. The Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT organization in the U. S., promptly reacted: They demanded that the U.S. Department of Treasury investigate the World Congress of Families to see if they had violated sanctions against Russia. Originally, it was actually the World Congress of Families that wished to hold its international conference in Moscow this year, but due to the Ukraine conflict they gave the event over to the Russian hosts.
Thomas Ward, President of the National Association of Catholic Families in England spoke of a “brutal culture of planned demographic collapse”. He said our culture’s Achilles heel is parental rights. Only parents can protect their children and guard them against sexual indoctrination in the schools.

In the afternoon, there were ten roundtable discussions each with 20 or more speakers. Each was to give his message within seven minutes - no time for questions or discussion. However, the organizers evidently wanted to make the knowledge of international experts on the culture of life available to Russia. Elena Mizulina says, “Russia has decided. It is holding on to traditional family values. All religions in the Russian Federation are for the family. Ninety-five percent of the population rejects same-sex partnership. But the U. S and the Western nations are waging ideological war against us.”

Everything discussed here is to be published on the Internet (www.st-andrew-foundation.org). Natalia Yakunina believes that because the forum is taking place in the Kremlin, all of Russia will hear the message.

The migration of ideology and its consequences is astounding. In 1884 Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx, saw in the “antagonism” of man and woman in monogamous marriage the first “class-conflict”. In 1917, Alexandra Kollontai, the first female commissar of the Soviet worker’s council set about the sexual-political destruction of the family. However, even Lenin had to repeal the agenda — to the frustration of Western communists like Wilhelm Reich — because it caused social chaos that stood in the way of creating his socialist utopia.

The communist agenda migrated westward and gained a full head of steam in the 1960s student rebellions, marching through the institutions to the very top. Today deregulation of sexual norms for the purpose of destroying the family is being implemented around the world by the United Nations and the European Union and their network of NGOs, billionaires’ foundations and corporations.
However, in 2014, Russia, under the pressure of the demographic crisis, sets the course for family and its ethical foundations, recognizing, as it is said in the program: “Humanity must move forward into the future based on the understanding that the natural family has been and remains the foundation of civilization; and the family was – and still is – and forever will be the marriage between man and woman with many children.”

Gabriele Kuby participated in the conference as a speaker.

Gabriele Kuby, German sociologist, book author and international speaker. Her main issue is the ideology of genderism which undermines the family and democratic liberty. Her latest book, Die globale sexuelle Revolution – Zerstörung der Freiheit im Namen der Freiheit, (The Global Sexual Revolution – Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom) has become an instrument of resistance in many countries.

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Taken from: http://vvpost.com/family/148-from-russia-the-anti-family-poison-spread-and-now-from-russia-comes-the-antidote.html

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Strong leadership asset for Church in Ukraine


‘We are your brothers’ – archbishop’s calm, cool response to Putin’s ‘aggression and brutality’
Printable version

 
By George Weigel
28 May, 2014
When we first met in April 2011, what impressed me initially about Sviato-slav Shevchuk was his almost preternatural calm: which was striking, in that, less than a month before and still a few weeks shy of his 41st birthday, Shevchuk (pictured) had been elected Major-Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Byzantine in liturgy and governance while in full communion with the Bishop of Rome.

Shevchuk had been snatched out of Buenos Aires, where he was bishop to the Ukrainian diaspora there (and a friend of the city’s Latin-rite archbishop, Jorge Mario Bergoglio), and thrust into the position previously filled by some of the most formidable figures in modern Catholic history: Andrey Sheptytsky, the Ukrainian Catholic leader who did more than perhaps anyone else to shape Ukrainian cultural self-awareness in the first four decades of the 20th century; Josyf Slipyj, Sheptytsky’s successor and the model for the “pope from the steppes” in The Shoes of the Fisherman, who spent more than a decade in Gulag camps; Lubomyr Husar, who became the most widely respected figure in independent Ukraine after the Soviet crack-up in 1991. In 2011, when we had a wide-ranging conversation in Rome, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk might have looked forward to 3½ decades of work building his Church in Ukraine and strengthening the links between the motherland and Ukrainian émigrés around the world (he might also have expected, not unreasonably, to become the youngest cardinal in a century).

Then events took over, as they have a tendency to do.

For the past six months, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk has been a key figure in the Maidan revolution of dignity that first demanded a return to the elementary decencies of public life in Ukraine, and then set about building a new Ukrainian political order. After the Russian invasion of his country, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk has worked tirelessly to inform the world of the truth of Ukraine’s plight and to maintain, under extreme pressure, the new Ukraine’s commitment to the civic virtues that inspired the Maidan movement in the first place.

So I was all the more impressed that he was as calm as ever when he called me in Rome on the evening of 30 April. We were both in the city for the canonisations of John XXIII and John Paul II, and while our schedules hadn’t permitted another meeting, the archbishop wanted to talk over his country’s dire situation – and to send a message to Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church.

The message to Russia was simple:

“We in Ukraine wish to be good neighbors. Do not attack us. We are not your enemies, and we have no aggressive intentions.”

The message to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leaders had too often been tacit or explicit mouthpieces for the Putin government’s propaganda and lies, was similar:

“The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is not an enemy of the Russian Orthodox Church. We are your brothers; we have been born from the same spiritual womb. From the holy city of Kiev, where our peoples were baptised, we are sending you a message of peace. Do not let politicians provoke hatred and bloodshed among us.”

Major-Archbishop Shevchuk is no naïf. He understands that the Putin propaganda machine aims at nothing less than deconstructing the very idea of “Ukraine” as an independent nation, expressive of a distinctive culture and worthy of independent statehood. Thus while crisply describing the Russian “psychological” attack that aimed to “divine and disintegrate” his country, his bottom line was that “Ukraine does exist and will exist” and is “prepared” spiritually to resist whatever may come.

That spiritual resistance is, of course, made possible by leadership. And both leadership and resistance are strengthened by intercession; as Major-Archbishop Shevchuk put it: “St John Paul II will protect us and protect the world from new iron curtains and new Berlin Walls.”

All of which is deeply moving, even as it throws into sharp relief the fecklessness of Washington, Brussels, London, Paris and Berlin in addressing Vladimir Putin’s mendacity, aggression, and brutality.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre in Washington, DC. His column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver, Colorado, US.

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Taken from: http://catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?