Intervention of Card. Lubomyr HUSAR, Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halyč (UKRAINE), “IN SCRIPTIS”

I intend to intervene on two topics that, among numerous others, are present in the Instrumentum laboris and that constitute elements that require close attention, in my opinion, and constant concern insofar as they involve us as Eastern Churches, going beyond our geographical and historical boundaries. Then I will conclude with two concrete proposals.
1. The first point I intervene on is the whole world of emigration. We Ukrainian Greek Catholics share with the brothers of the Middle East the drama of the migration of our faithful, even if the reasons are different. The statistics show that in these last few years five million Ukrainians emigrated towards the rest of the world and Western Europe in particular, half of whom came from the regions where the majority of our faithful live.
We have to acknowledge that generally in the countries they have emigrated to they have been welcomed by the Latin dioceses, but this does not relieve us of the serious responsibility we have of safeguarding the faith according to the Eastern tradition to which they belong and in which they have to be looked after with the appropriate specific pastoral care of their own rites, in line with what is also written clearly in canon law
In the Instrumentum laboris this right-duty of ours is recognized at no. 6 where we read: “The faithful of the Churches sui iuris are understood to be individual persons and their respective communities as a whole”. It seems evident that these, although having left their homeland, have to be placed in a position where they can exercise their faith of origin with the guarantee of all the means which their Church has at its disposal for pastoral care: their own priests, their own rite, their own spirituality, their own community life.
The objection might be raised that this guarantee could constitute an obstacle to integration in the new situations in which our faithful have decided to live. Our centuries-old experience teaches us that this is absolutely not true: our faithful in the Americas and in Australia, as well as in the various countries of Europe, are perfectly integrated today while maintaining intact their patrimony and exercising full membership of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Allow me to make an observation as regards this: one Church Father defined it as “circumdata varietate” to mean that the unity of the Church should not be identified with uniformity, but should express the richness of God the Creator in the harmony of differences and multiplicities, wishing to employ the term chosen that is also used in the Instrumentum laboris. As St. Ignatius of Antioch explains clearly with the image of the strings of a cithara and the symphony of a choir that sings, diversity is not a danger but an inalienable treasure for the Universal Church, bearing in mind, naturally, that the Successor of Peter has the divine mandate of conducting the choir to avoid flat notes and thus guarantee the symphony of truth and charity.
We have to find the courage in the Holy Spirit to live the harmony in multiplicity or diversity in all those regions that, up to few decades ago, were characterized by the presence of a single rite and were used to a sort of monopoly. We can observe that territory, faced by the growing challenge of migration, today is no longer a geographical but an anthropological concept. Applying the principle enunciated in the abovementioned quotation from the Instrumentum laboris, it seems to me we have to conclude that the territory of all the Churches sui iuris is made up of people of faith there where, for various reason, they have decided to live. Wehave to, therefore, rethink and review the instruments, including juridical ones, to ensure this principle practically, to guarantee the salus animarum of our faithful for whom we are responsible wherever they are as pastors, and to overcome the eventual danger of assimilation that impoverishes the structural nature of the Church as desired by Our Lord Jesus Christ.2. The second topic I wish to offer for shared reflection comes from no. 20 of our Instrumentum laboris having as its subject “apostolicity and missionary vocation”. Here it is affirmed: “In being apostolic, our Churches have a special mission to bring the Gospel to the whole world. Such has been the case throughout history”. Sadly I have to concur with what is stated in critical terms immediately after this, referring to a typical closed mentality of those who feel besieged or who have lived within absolutist ethnic or ideological boundaries, such as happened to us for 70 years with the Soviet Communist regime. It is true that the “evangelical ardor” has decreased. I ask myself: are the signs that can be seen in our Churches sui iuris - the Church in Ukraine as well has rumblings of new problems - and the singular phenomenon of mass emigration of our faithful that strikes us so profoundly not perhaps a sign sent by the Holy Spirit so that we, like Abraham, should leave the certainties of Ur of the Chaldees and set off on a journey through the whole world? And I am not scared to say “the whole world”, that is, also where the Church until today or yesterday knew situations that I could define as being of peaceful possession, presently in profound crisis because of defection or superficiality or the opposition of anti-Christian people and cultures. I ask myself: if the whole Universal Church is missionary, is this situation not perhaps a provocation for us of the Eastern tradition to decide to go ad gentes, wherever this gentes needs or awaits the Word that will save them? The wealth of our spirituality and our Liturgies is a patrimony to be shared and not jealously guarded or even hidden in our communities. It is true that we are poor compared to many other brothers, but we must never forget that God always chooses the humble and the poor to perform his marvelous works, as in the case, the sublime example, of Mary, the Thetokos.
3. The two issues I brought to our shared attention are just a small part of the great challenges that we have to face daily and in front of which we often feel unprepared or inadequate or weak, in any case, in difficulty. We need the help of Peter.
And here is the proposal-appeal that I make in all simplicity and with profound faith: to set up a body formed by the Patriarchs and Major Archbishops of the Eastern Churches in communion with Rome, similar to the Permanent Synod of the Eastern Tradition, through which the Successor of Saint Peter can comfort, support and advise us on how to give evangelical fullness to our ministry and mission.
4. Based on this first proposal, I put forward a second. I ask the Participants at this Synod to ask the Holy Father to dedicate a Synod in the near future to the general theme of the nature and role of the Eastern Catholic Churches.

[00192-02.05] [IS001] [Original text: Italian]