Category: 2011

Summing Up and Looking Forward

Roland Smith

This conference has of course been focusing on both Ukraine and Belarus, and I shall try in this concluding talk to have both countries in mind. I don’t pretend to be trying to sum up in the sense of presenting conclusions with which everyone is meant to agree. And obviously a good deal of what I’m going to say was prepared beforehand. But it does also include my own reflections on what we have learned over the last couple of days. If I show a certain bias towards Ukraine, I hope I shall be forgiven. I have visited Belarus several times, and I have met President Lukashenko – though admittedly the meeting took place in Lisbon rather than in Minsk. But obviously my main experience is of Ukraine, where I served for several years.

What are we trying to do in Belarus and Ukraine? How can we do it better? Do we have an ultimate vision of the place the two countries in Europe and in the world? Is that vision one which we share with the peoples of the two countries, and if so, how can we help them to turn it into reality? And what role can churches and Christian organisations play in the process?

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The Borderland of Faith – Ukraine?

Neville Kyrke-Smith

Introduction

I speak from the perspective of an international Catholic charity which has been helping in Eastern and Central Europe for nearly 60 years. Please forgive me for the fact that the main focus of this talk is on the activities of the Greek Catholic Church and the Latin-Rite (Roman Catholic) Church: this is not to denigrate the work or situation facing different ecclesial communities. I hope it gives some insight into something of a religious revival in Ukraine, where 50 per cent of Christians attended church last Easter, and to the challenges facing Christians in Ukraine.

First something about Aid to the Church in Need. The objectives of the charity are to:

• advance the Christian religion by supporting and promoting the Church, especially in countries where Christians are suffering persecution or discrimination;
• further the other charitable work of the Church by providing practical assistance and pastoral care for persons in need, especially those who are living in, or are refugees from, such countries. (Memorandum and & Articles of Association 3 Aid to the Church in Need UK)

This summer I returned to Ukraine for my fourth trip. Standing at the Divine Liturgy in a beautiful wooden church near Stryisky Park in Lviv, I prayed with Fr Bohdan Prakh and Fr Borys Gudziak, two of the energetic and visionary priests of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Fr Bohdan Prakh had been the Rector of the major Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv and Fr Borys Gudziak is the Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University. Both of these priests have done so much to build up the Christian faith in the post-Soviet era.

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Chernobyl Children’s Project and its Projects in Belarus

John and Julie Gater

Holidays in Belarus

Our first holiday at a sanatorium, or holiday camp, in Belarus took place in the summer of 1998. We arranged for 50 children from Zhuravichi Boarding Home and 50 from Garadyets Special School, who had never had the chance of a holiday before, to travel to a holiday camp in a beautiful part of the country. Volunteers flew out to work with the children and make sure they had a great time. Carers from Zhuravichi were able to see that the children were capable of doing much more than they had ever thought possible, and the children had the most memorable experience of their lives.

It was such a success that we have arranged a holiday every summer for children from Zhuravichi, and in recent years they have been accompanied by the children without parents who live at Rechitsa Boarding School.

The children are given the opportunity to paint, draw, cut and paste, make masks, play ball games, have races, watch films and live performances, take part in discos and from time to time to have the one-to-one attention which is just not possible at Zhuravichi.

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Similar Origins, Different Outcomes: Religion in Ukraine and Belarus

Philip Walters

Borderlands

Ukraine means ‘Borderland’: Ukraine and and Belarus lie along the basic fault line in Europe between the Catholic/Protestant West and the Orthodox/Muslim East. The question ‘What is Ukraine?’ is still a lively one in that country: is it part of ‘Europe’; part of Russia; or a state in its own right, seeking its ‘special path’?

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the largest country in Europe after Russia, and at its greatest extent, in the mid-seventeenth century, it included the whole of modern Belarus; western, northern and north-eastern Ukraine; and Russian territory to beyond Smolensk. Roman Catholicism was the traditionally dominant religion of the Belarusian nobility and of a large part of the population of western Belarus. Most of the population of eastern Belarus and Ukraine, however, were Orthodox.

Meanwhile the south-western part of today’s Ukraine, including Odessa, was part of the Ottoman Empire; and the more than three centuries’ independent flourishing of the Crimean Khanate (1441-1783) shows that Muslims are indigenous and historically rooted in this area, in contrast to the later arrivals in Western Europe: the first recorded mosque in Crimea was built in 1262.

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