by ÁLVARO PEÑAS (Follow on X)
MADRID—The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has five million members worldwide, is in union with the Pope, and celebrates a liturgy that looks Orthodox. Its priests may marry. In western Ukraine it is the dominant church— Lviv is a Greek Catholic city, with the highest worship attendance in the country.
Moscow has banned the church twice. The Soviets outlawed it in 1946, arrested its bishops, and drove the faithful underground for forty years. In the territories Russia occupies today, it is banned again.
‘Today, the concept of “just war” is changing, and Pope Leo is thoroughly rethinking its meaning.’
Its leader is Major Archbishop His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, and his new book is called * Chronicle of a Sacrilegious War*—the sacrilege being
He presented it at CEU San Pablo University here on May 25. I went, and wrote an article about the calm with which he said all this. A few days after Ukraine’s Independence Day, he gave me an interview. We spoke, among many other things, about the “just war,” how to overcome hatred, and the gift of freedom.
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PEÑAS: Against the sacrilegious war that Putin is waging with the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, there is the Christian concept of a “just war.”
SHEVCHUK: Today, the concept of “just war” is changing, and Pope Leo is thoroughly rethinking its meaning. Often, the talk is not of a just war, but of a justified war, and everyone wants to justify the use of modern weapons to employ war as a tool for resolving problems between states. That is why we must refine our language and be more precise. At the most recent consistory held in Rome, the cardinals effectively rejected the concept of “just war” because war can never be a means to achieve international political or economic objectives.
