UKRAINIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH OF THE USA

OFFICE OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

During its regular session, held on June 23-25, 2008, The Holy and Sacred Synod reviewed the invitation requesting a Patriarchal Delegation to attend the festivities of the 1020th anniversary of the Christianization of the Kievan Rus and of His Excellency Viktor Yushchenko, President of Ukraine, to His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to personally lead the aforementioned festivities.

Having evaluated the invitations of the Church, Nation and the Ukrainian people, and in honoring their feelings, the Mother Church – as the one who originally guided the Ukrainian people into baptism – decided to respond to the aforementioned invitations through the sending of a Patriarchal Delegation under the personal leadership of His All Holiness.

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His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew: "Therefore, it is a common duty of the civic, political, ecclesiastical and in general intellectual leadership of the Ukrainian people to utilize by every appropriate means the God-given gift of the Baptism not only for the immediate cure of various confusions and traumatic events of the historic past, but also for the restoration of the cohesive role that the Orthodox Church played in the consciousness of the Christ-loving Ukrainian nation.

If this confusion is prolonged in order to serve ethnophyletic or political ends and purposes foreign to the Church’s spiritual character would abolish the cohesive power of the Baptism and would worsen the already dangerous division of the ecclesial body, a division that wounds not only spiritual unity but also the communal coherence of the Ukrainian people with obvious troublesome consequences for the future of Ukraine."