This morning, in the Sala Bologna at the Vatican Apostolic Palace, the Holy Father, Pope Francis received in audience the members of the Permanent Synod of the Greek-Catholic Ukrainian Church.
Your Beatitude,
Dear brother Major Archbishop,
Your Eminences,
Your Excellencies,
Dear brothers!
I wanted to invite you here to Rome for a fraternal sharing, along with the Superiors of the competent Dicasteries of the Roman Curia. I thank you for accepting the invitation, it's nice to see you. For a long time, Ukraine has been experiencing a difficult and delicate situation; for over five years she has been wounded by a conflict that many call hybrid, composed as it is by warring actions where those responsible are camouflaged; a conflict where the weakest and the smallest pay the highest price, a conflict aggravated by propaganda, falsifications and various types of manipulation, including attempts to involve the religious dimension.
I carry you in my heart and I am praying for you, dear Ukrainian Brothers. And I assure you that sometimes I do it with the prayers I remember and that I learned from Bishop Stefano Chmil, then a Salesian priest; he taught me when I was 12, in 1949, and I learned from him to serve the Divine Liturgy three times a week. I thank you for your fidelity to the Lord and to the Successor of Peter, which has often been costly throughout history, and I beg the Lord to accompany the actions of all political leaders to seek not the so-called partisan good, which in the end is always an interest at the expense of someone else, but the common good, peace. And I ask the God of all consolation (2 Cor 1:3) to comfort the souls of those who have lost their loved ones because of war, those who bear their wounds in body and spirit, those who have had to leave their homes and work places and face the risk of looking for a more human future elsewhere, far away. You know that my gaze goes every morning and every evening to the Madonna which His Beatitude gave me as a gift, when he left Buenos Aires to assume the office of Major Archbishop that the Church had entrusted to him. Before that icon, I begin and end every day entrusting all of you - your Church - to the tenderness of the Madonna, who is our Mother. We can say that I start every day and finish every day in Ukrainian, looking at the Madonna.
The main role of the Church, faced with the complex situations caused by conflicts, is to offer a witness of Christian hope. Not a hope of the world, which is based on things that pass, come and go, and often divide, but the hope that never disappoints, that does not give way to discouragement, that knows how to overcome all tribulation in the sweet strength of the Spirit (cf Rm 5:2-5). Christian hope, nourished by the light of Christ, makes the resurrection and life shine even in the darkest nights of the world. Therefore, dear Brothers, I believe that in difficult times, even more than in times of peace, the priority for believers is to be united to Jesus, our hope. It is a question of renewing that union founded on baptism and rooted in faith, rooted in the history of our communities, rooted in great witnesses: I think of the host of heroes of everyday life, of those numerous saints next door who, with simplicity; in your people they have responded to evil with good (cf Rm 12:21). They are the examples to look at: those who in the mildness of the Beatitudes had the Christian courage, that of not opposing the wicked, of loving their enemies and praying for their persecutors (cf Mt 5:39.44). In the violent field of history, they have planted the cross of Christ. And they bore fruit. These brothers and sisters of yours who have suffered persecution and martyrdom and who have not rejected the Lord Jesus, have rejected the logic of the world, according to which violence is answered with violence; they have written the clearest pages of faith with their lives: they are fruitful seeds of Christian hope. I read the book Perseguitati per la verità . Behind those priests, bishops, nuns, there is the people of God, who carry all the people with faith and prayer.
A few years ago, the Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church adopted the pastoral program entitled The Living Parish, a meeting place with the living Christ. In some translations, the expression living parish has been rendered with the adjective vibrant. Indeed, the encounter with Jesus, the spiritual life, the prayer that vibrates in the beauty of your Liturgy transmits that beautiful strength of peace, which soothes wounds, instills courage but not aggression. When, as from a well of spring water, we draw on this spiritual vitality and transmit it, the Church becomes fruitful. Become proclaimers of the Gospel of hope, teachers of that interior life that no other institution is able to offer.
This is why I wish to encourage you all, as Pastors of God's holy people, to have this primary concern in all your activities: prayer and the spiritual life. It is the first job, no one else is more important. Everyone must know and see that in your tradition you are a Church that knows how to speak in spiritual and not worldly terms (cf 1 Cor 2:13). In order to achieve heaven on earth you need to make it possible for every person to approach the Church, nothing else. May the Lord grant us this grace and make all of us dedicated to our sanctification and that of the faithful entrusted to us. On the night of the conflict you are going through, as in Gethsemane, the Lord asks his people to watch and pray; not to defend oneself, let alone to attack others. But the disciples slept instead of praying and at the arrival of Judas they brought out their swords. They had not prayed and had fallen into temptation, into the temptation of worldliness: the violent weakness of the flesh had prevailed over the meekness of the spirit. Not sleep, not the sword, not flight (cf Mt 26:40,52,56), but prayer and self-giving to the end are the answers the Lord expects from his own. Only these answers are Christian, they alone can save us from the worldly spiral of violence.
The Church is called to carry out her pastoral mission by various means. Closeness comes after prayer. What the Lord asked his Apostles that evening, to stay close to him and to keep watch (cf Mk 14:34), today he asks his Pastors: to be with his people, keeping watch beside those who go through the night of pain. The proximity of the Pastors to the faithful is a channel that is built day by day and that brings the living water of hope. This is how it is built, meeting after meeting, with the priests who know and take to heart the concerns of the people, and the faithful who, through the care they receive, assimilate the proclamation of the Gospel that the Pastors transmit. They will not understand it if the Pastors are only intent on saying God; they understand it if they do their utmost to give God: by giving themselves, standing nearby, witnesses to the God of hope who became flesh to walk on man's roads. The Church is the place where hope is drawn, where the door is always open, where consolation and encouragement are received. Never closed, with no one, but with open hearts; never watch the clock, never send home those who need to be heard. We are servants of time. We live in time. Please do not fall into the temptation of living as watchful slaves! Time, not the clock.
Pastoral care includes first and foremost the liturgy which, as the Major Archbishop has often emphasized, together with spirituality and catechesis constitutes an element that characterizes the identity of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. In a world still disfigured by selfishness and greed, it reveals the way to the balance of the new man (Saint John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, 11): the way of charity and unconditional love, within which every other activity must be rooted, so that the fraternal bond between people, inside and outside the community, are nourished. With this spirit of closeness, in 2016, I promoted a humanitarian initiative in which I invited the Churches in Europe to participate, in order to offer help to those who had been most directly affected by the conflict. I again warmly thank all those who have contributed to the creation of this collection, both economically and on an organizational and technical level. In the wake of that first initiative, now substantially completed, I would like other special projects to follow. Already at this meeting some information can be provided. It is so important to be close to everyone and to be concrete, also to avoid the danger that a situation of suffering as serious as this should fall into general oblivion. We cannot forget the brother who suffers, wherever he comes from. We cannot forget the brother who suffers.
I would like to add a third word to prayer and closeness, which is so familiar to you: synodality. Being Church is being a community that walks together. It is not enough to have a synod, you must be a synod. The Church needs an intense internal sharing: a living dialogue between the Pastors and between the Pastors and the faithful. As an Eastern Catholic Church, you already have a marked synodal expression in your canonical order, which calls for frequent and regular recourse to the assemblies of the Synod of Bishops. But every day we must make a synod, striving to walk together, not only with those who think in the same way - this would be easy - but with all those who believe in Jesus.
Three aspects revive synodality. First of all, listening: listening to the experiences and suggestions of the bishops and the priests. It is important that everyone within the Synod feels that they have been heard. Listening is all the more important as you go up in the hierarchy. Listening is sensitivity and openness to the opinions of the brothers, even those who are younger, even those considered less experienced. A second aspect: co-responsibility. We cannot be indifferent to the errors or the carelessness of others, without intervening in a fraternal but convinced way: our confreres need our thoughts, our encouragement, as well as our corrections, because, precisely, we are called to walk together. You cannot hide what is wrong and move on as if nothing had happened to defend your good name at all costs: charity must always be lived in truth, in transparency, in that parresia that purifies the Church and keeps it going. A third aspect of synodality is that it also means involvement of the laity: as full members of the Church, they too are called to express themselves, to give suggestions. Participants in ecclesial life, they should not only be welcomed but listened to. And I emphasize this verb: to listen. Whoever listens afterwards can speak well. Those who are used to not listening, do not speak, they bark.
Synodality also leads to broadening horizons, to living the richness of one's own tradition within the universality of the Church: to benefitting from good relations with other rites; to considering the beauty of sharing significant parts of one's own theological and liturgical treasure with other communities, even non-Catholic ones; to weaving fruitful relations with other particular Churches, as well as with the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia. Unity in the Church will be all the more fruitful, the more the understanding and cohesion between the Holy See and the particular Churches is real. More precisely: how much more understanding and cohesion there will be between all the Bishops and with the Bishop of Rome. This certainly must not lead to a decrease in the awareness of one's own authenticity and originality (Orientale Lumen, 21), but shape it within our Catholic identity, that is, universally. As universal, it is endangered and can be worn down by attachment to particularisms of various kinds: ecclesial particularisms, nationalistic particularisms, political particularisms.
Dear brothers, these two days of meetings, which I strongly desired, are intense moments of sharing, reciprocal listening, and free dialogue, always animated by the search for good, in the spirit of the Gospel. Help us to walk better together. It is, in a sense, a sort of Synod dedicated to the issues that are most dear to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in this period, which is burdened by ongoing military conflict and characterized by a series of political and ecclesial processes far more extensive than those concerning our Catholic Church. But I commend to you this spirit, this discernment on which you can focus: prayer and spiritual life in the first place; then closeness, especially to those who suffer; therefore: synodality, journey together, open path, step by step, with meekness and docility. I thank you, I accompany you on this journey and I ask you, please, to remember me in your prayers.
Thank you!
Testo originale in italiano
Greetings of the Holy Father, Pope Francis
offered to members of the Permanent Synod
of the Greek-Catholic Ukrainian Church
Your Beatitude,
Dear brother Major Archbishop,
Your Eminences,
Your Excellencies,
Dear brothers!
I wanted to invite you here to Rome for a fraternal sharing, along with the Superiors of the competent Dicasteries of the Roman Curia. I thank you for accepting the invitation, it's nice to see you. For a long time, Ukraine has been experiencing a difficult and delicate situation; for over five years she has been wounded by a conflict that many call hybrid, composed as it is by warring actions where those responsible are camouflaged; a conflict where the weakest and the smallest pay the highest price, a conflict aggravated by propaganda, falsifications and various types of manipulation, including attempts to involve the religious dimension.
I carry you in my heart and I am praying for you, dear Ukrainian Brothers. And I assure you that sometimes I do it with the prayers I remember and that I learned from Bishop Stefano Chmil, then a Salesian priest; he taught me when I was 12, in 1949, and I learned from him to serve the Divine Liturgy three times a week. I thank you for your fidelity to the Lord and to the Successor of Peter, which has often been costly throughout history, and I beg the Lord to accompany the actions of all political leaders to seek not the so-called partisan good, which in the end is always an interest at the expense of someone else, but the common good, peace. And I ask the God of all consolation (2 Cor 1:3) to comfort the souls of those who have lost their loved ones because of war, those who bear their wounds in body and spirit, those who have had to leave their homes and work places and face the risk of looking for a more human future elsewhere, far away. You know that my gaze goes every morning and every evening to the Madonna which His Beatitude gave me as a gift, when he left Buenos Aires to assume the office of Major Archbishop that the Church had entrusted to him. Before that icon, I begin and end every day entrusting all of you - your Church - to the tenderness of the Madonna, who is our Mother. We can say that I start every day and finish every day in Ukrainian, looking at the Madonna.
The main role of the Church, faced with the complex situations caused by conflicts, is to offer a witness of Christian hope. Not a hope of the world, which is based on things that pass, come and go, and often divide, but the hope that never disappoints, that does not give way to discouragement, that knows how to overcome all tribulation in the sweet strength of the Spirit (cf Rm 5:2-5). Christian hope, nourished by the light of Christ, makes the resurrection and life shine even in the darkest nights of the world. Therefore, dear Brothers, I believe that in difficult times, even more than in times of peace, the priority for believers is to be united to Jesus, our hope. It is a question of renewing that union founded on baptism and rooted in faith, rooted in the history of our communities, rooted in great witnesses: I think of the host of heroes of everyday life, of those numerous saints next door who, with simplicity; in your people they have responded to evil with good (cf Rm 12:21). They are the examples to look at: those who in the mildness of the Beatitudes had the Christian courage, that of not opposing the wicked, of loving their enemies and praying for their persecutors (cf Mt 5:39.44). In the violent field of history, they have planted the cross of Christ. And they bore fruit. These brothers and sisters of yours who have suffered persecution and martyrdom and who have not rejected the Lord Jesus, have rejected the logic of the world, according to which violence is answered with violence; they have written the clearest pages of faith with their lives: they are fruitful seeds of Christian hope. I read the book Perseguitati per la verità . Behind those priests, bishops, nuns, there is the people of God, who carry all the people with faith and prayer.
A few years ago, the Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church adopted the pastoral program entitled The Living Parish, a meeting place with the living Christ. In some translations, the expression living parish has been rendered with the adjective vibrant. Indeed, the encounter with Jesus, the spiritual life, the prayer that vibrates in the beauty of your Liturgy transmits that beautiful strength of peace, which soothes wounds, instills courage but not aggression. When, as from a well of spring water, we draw on this spiritual vitality and transmit it, the Church becomes fruitful. Become proclaimers of the Gospel of hope, teachers of that interior life that no other institution is able to offer.
This is why I wish to encourage you all, as Pastors of God's holy people, to have this primary concern in all your activities: prayer and the spiritual life. It is the first job, no one else is more important. Everyone must know and see that in your tradition you are a Church that knows how to speak in spiritual and not worldly terms (cf 1 Cor 2:13). In order to achieve heaven on earth you need to make it possible for every person to approach the Church, nothing else. May the Lord grant us this grace and make all of us dedicated to our sanctification and that of the faithful entrusted to us. On the night of the conflict you are going through, as in Gethsemane, the Lord asks his people to watch and pray; not to defend oneself, let alone to attack others. But the disciples slept instead of praying and at the arrival of Judas they brought out their swords. They had not prayed and had fallen into temptation, into the temptation of worldliness: the violent weakness of the flesh had prevailed over the meekness of the spirit. Not sleep, not the sword, not flight (cf Mt 26:40,52,56), but prayer and self-giving to the end are the answers the Lord expects from his own. Only these answers are Christian, they alone can save us from the worldly spiral of violence.
The Church is called to carry out her pastoral mission by various means. Closeness comes after prayer. What the Lord asked his Apostles that evening, to stay close to him and to keep watch (cf Mk 14:34), today he asks his Pastors: to be with his people, keeping watch beside those who go through the night of pain. The proximity of the Pastors to the faithful is a channel that is built day by day and that brings the living water of hope. This is how it is built, meeting after meeting, with the priests who know and take to heart the concerns of the people, and the faithful who, through the care they receive, assimilate the proclamation of the Gospel that the Pastors transmit. They will not understand it if the Pastors are only intent on saying God; they understand it if they do their utmost to give God: by giving themselves, standing nearby, witnesses to the God of hope who became flesh to walk on man's roads. The Church is the place where hope is drawn, where the door is always open, where consolation and encouragement are received. Never closed, with no one, but with open hearts; never watch the clock, never send home those who need to be heard. We are servants of time. We live in time. Please do not fall into the temptation of living as watchful slaves! Time, not the clock.
Pastoral care includes first and foremost the liturgy which, as the Major Archbishop has often emphasized, together with spirituality and catechesis constitutes an element that characterizes the identity of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. In a world still disfigured by selfishness and greed, it reveals the way to the balance of the new man (Saint John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, 11): the way of charity and unconditional love, within which every other activity must be rooted, so that the fraternal bond between people, inside and outside the community, are nourished. With this spirit of closeness, in 2016, I promoted a humanitarian initiative in which I invited the Churches in Europe to participate, in order to offer help to those who had been most directly affected by the conflict. I again warmly thank all those who have contributed to the creation of this collection, both economically and on an organizational and technical level. In the wake of that first initiative, now substantially completed, I would like other special projects to follow. Already at this meeting some information can be provided. It is so important to be close to everyone and to be concrete, also to avoid the danger that a situation of suffering as serious as this should fall into general oblivion. We cannot forget the brother who suffers, wherever he comes from. We cannot forget the brother who suffers.
I would like to add a third word to prayer and closeness, which is so familiar to you: synodality. Being Church is being a community that walks together. It is not enough to have a synod, you must be a synod. The Church needs an intense internal sharing: a living dialogue between the Pastors and between the Pastors and the faithful. As an Eastern Catholic Church, you already have a marked synodal expression in your canonical order, which calls for frequent and regular recourse to the assemblies of the Synod of Bishops. But every day we must make a synod, striving to walk together, not only with those who think in the same way - this would be easy - but with all those who believe in Jesus.
Three aspects revive synodality. First of all, listening: listening to the experiences and suggestions of the bishops and the priests. It is important that everyone within the Synod feels that they have been heard. Listening is all the more important as you go up in the hierarchy. Listening is sensitivity and openness to the opinions of the brothers, even those who are younger, even those considered less experienced. A second aspect: co-responsibility. We cannot be indifferent to the errors or the carelessness of others, without intervening in a fraternal but convinced way: our confreres need our thoughts, our encouragement, as well as our corrections, because, precisely, we are called to walk together. You cannot hide what is wrong and move on as if nothing had happened to defend your good name at all costs: charity must always be lived in truth, in transparency, in that parresia that purifies the Church and keeps it going. A third aspect of synodality is that it also means involvement of the laity: as full members of the Church, they too are called to express themselves, to give suggestions. Participants in ecclesial life, they should not only be welcomed but listened to. And I emphasize this verb: to listen. Whoever listens afterwards can speak well. Those who are used to not listening, do not speak, they bark.
Synodality also leads to broadening horizons, to living the richness of one's own tradition within the universality of the Church: to benefitting from good relations with other rites; to considering the beauty of sharing significant parts of one's own theological and liturgical treasure with other communities, even non-Catholic ones; to weaving fruitful relations with other particular Churches, as well as with the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia. Unity in the Church will be all the more fruitful, the more the understanding and cohesion between the Holy See and the particular Churches is real. More precisely: how much more understanding and cohesion there will be between all the Bishops and with the Bishop of Rome. This certainly must not lead to a decrease in the awareness of one's own authenticity and originality (Orientale Lumen, 21), but shape it within our Catholic identity, that is, universally. As universal, it is endangered and can be worn down by attachment to particularisms of various kinds: ecclesial particularisms, nationalistic particularisms, political particularisms.
Dear brothers, these two days of meetings, which I strongly desired, are intense moments of sharing, reciprocal listening, and free dialogue, always animated by the search for good, in the spirit of the Gospel. Help us to walk better together. It is, in a sense, a sort of Synod dedicated to the issues that are most dear to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in this period, which is burdened by ongoing military conflict and characterized by a series of political and ecclesial processes far more extensive than those concerning our Catholic Church. But I commend to you this spirit, this discernment on which you can focus: prayer and spiritual life in the first place; then closeness, especially to those who suffer; therefore: synodality, journey together, open path, step by step, with meekness and docility. I thank you, I accompany you on this journey and I ask you, please, to remember me in your prayers.
Thank you!
Testo originale in italiano
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