VATICAN CITY, July 18 (AP)
The Vatican today restated Pope Paul’s refusal to grand Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, the 83 — year-old Ukrainian Catholic leader, the title and power of patriarch.
Earlier this week Wasyl Markus, a professor of political science at Loyola University, Chicago, III., had said the refusal was to please Soviet authorities. He led a group of defiant Ukrainians in holding a news conference a few blocks from St. Peter’s Basilica and said they would consider Cardinal Slipyj a patriarch in his full right.
Today’s statement from Vatican spokesman Federico Alessandrini said the pontiff acted in line with church law which stipulated that patriarchs, who have broader powers than a bishop and can appoint their own bishops, exert their authority within well defined territorial boundaries.
Alessandrini said Pope Paul had rejected twice, in 1971 and earlier this year, the demand that Cardinal Slipyj be made patriarch extending his ecclesiastical powers over all Ukrainian Catholics outside and inside the Soviet Union.
The demand has repeatedly been pressed by Ukrainian bishops and lay persons in the West, especially by those in the United States.
According to a Vatican Radio report, Mr. Alessandrini noted that on the two occasions that Pope Paul communicated «his negative decision» on the patriarchate to Cardinal Slipyi the Pontiff had added the expression. «at least for the moment.»
(For several years, Ukrainian Rite Catholics, principally through the worldwide Society for a Patriarchal System in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, have been seeking official Vatican recognition of Cardinal Slipyi as patriarch and have unofficially proclaimed the cardinal «Josyf I Patriarch of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.»)
In his statement to newsmen. Mr. Alessandrini said that during a recent gathering of Ukrainian Catholic pilgrims in Rome for the Holy Year «groups of Ukrainians spoke about attributing the title to Cardinal Slipyi.»
