ROME, July 14 (UPI) Ukrainian Rite Catholics living in the West accused the Vatican today of failing to defend their church at the European Security Conference.
Officials of the Ukrainian Patriarchal World Federation for Unity of Church and People told a news conference that the Vatican is discriminating against the largest Eastern Rite Church in union with Rome.
«The Holy See is represented at the European Security Conference in Helsinki and Geneva but we hardly hear a word from the representative of Holy Mother Church about the persecution of Ukrainian Catholics in the Soviet Union,» said Wasyl Markus, a political science professor at Loyola University in Chicago, III.
«We fear the Vatican’s representative may sign an accord which will not contain any guarantee of basic religious rights for Ukrainian Catholics,» Markus said. «We urge the Curia and the Vatican Secretariat of State to stand up and defend a branch of the Catholic Church in the same way it defends social justice and basic human rights everywhere except in the Soviet Union.»
Markus said, «We resent the silence of Vatican officials and Osservatore Romano (the Vatican newspaper) on the persecution of the Ukrainian Church under the Soviet regime.
We feel like stepchildren of the mother church. It is a question of survival not only for the Ukrainian Catholic Church bur for basic universal church principles as well.»
About 4,000 Ukrainian Rite Catholics from throughout the Western world Saturday attended a Holy Year service in St. Peter’s Basilica presided over by Cardinal Josyf Slipyi.
Slipyi spent 18 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps before his release and exile to the West in 1963. In 1971 he accused the Vatican of betraying his estimated five million followers in the Ukraine for the sake of improved diplomatic relations with Moscow.
The 83 — year — old Slipyi, as head of a virtually autonomous church within the Catholic communion, has asked Pope Paul VI to make him a patriarch like leaders of other Eastern Rite churches. The Pope has repeatedly refused on the ground Slipyi does not, and cannot, live in his See at Lvov.
In 1973 Slipyi’s followers in the West unilaterally declared him their patriarch.
