We Discover our True Selves When We Discover the Lord: Patriarch Sviatoslav

By Fr. Jeffrey D. Stephaniuk

First published May 17, 2011, Melfort Journal

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the new head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk. The Ukrainian Catholic bishops, some 50 worldwide, met in Lviv, Ukraine at the end of March 2011, the result of which was the election this forty year old man, previously bishop among Ukrainian Catholics in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Major Archbishop Sviatoslav has been communicating prolifically through “youtube” and the interrnet site of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. On the occasion of the beatification of Pope John Paul II, His Beatitude Sviatoslav recalled having met the Holy Father in Rome, shortly after the young priest completed his doctoral studies. Interested in his academic background because it was so similar to his own, Pope John Paul II reportedly instructed him to “go back to Ukraine, where you will have lots of work.”

Among his very first pastoral letters is one addressed to Ukrainian Catholic youth throughout the world. With reference to the children in the gospel of Palm Sunday, His Beatitude encourages young people to trust the Christian message that “Jesus Christ promises a personal encounter with Him, which it is the work of the Church to facilitate.”

Acknowledging the role of youth in the Church, he writes that “the Church needs your spontaneity and intuitive feeling about the reality of God, who is with us.” Being young does not mean being naïve, as Sviatoslav describes when he writes about the wounds and vulnerability of young people: “Often it is very difficult to allow ourselves to love, scared as we are of being used and humiliated. In all honesty there are times when we are unworthy of love, valuing material things higher than people, virtual relationships and cyber identities more than the real people around us. Such characteristics of modern culture have the effect of isolating us, making true relationships more difficult, creating a feeling of loneliness, even in public. Not having found the Lord, we are unable to find ourselves.”

Through the feasts of the Church, he encourages young people to “recognize Him who comes to each of us” and to “identify ourselves as Christians even when we are forbidden to do so.” In the Church, he says, we find “symbols of victory over sin and death, through which we receive the strength of Him, who goes to the resurrection. May we live this encounter, breathing in deeply the power of Love, with which together we are able to build our future.”

In his other recent letters to the faithful of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, His Beatitude has described the meaning of the priesthood as being “a servant of the spiritual cleansing of the person, in order that every believer has the opportunity to become a partaker of the innocent life of Christ himself.” About Easter, he writes that the celebration “is an invitation of the risen Christ to accompany him from death to life. Like a new Moses, he calls us to leave the Egyptian slavery, that is, anything which destroys in us the dignity we possess as children of God, what Pope John Paul II has called the culture of death.”