The head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church has expressed mixed feelings about the joint declaration by Pope Francis and Moscow’s Patriarch Kiril.
“In general it is positive,” Kiev-Halych’s Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said in an interview, highlighting how the declaration raised questions of mutual concern to Catholics and Orthodox, and opened new perspectives for cooperation.
“However,“ he continued, “the points which concern Ukraine in general and specifically the (Ukrainian Church) raised more questions than answers.” While pleased that the Russian Orthodox “no longer seem to object to our right to exist”, he added that the text had caused “deep disappointment among many faithful of our Church and among conscientious citizens of Ukraine”.
Many had contacted him, he said, to say “that they feel betrayed by the Vatican, disappointed by the half-truth nature of this document, and even see it as indirect support by the Apostolic See for Russian aggression against Ukraine”.
The two leaders seemed to have approached the meeting in wholly different ways, he said, with Pope Francis seeing it “primarily as a spiritual event” while Patriarch Kiril treating it as a political one.
