Ecumenism: Quo Vadis

I just finished reading a Catholic friend's editorial on the debacle which surrounds what is referred to here in Ukraine as the "Rivne Memorandum". Rivne is a region in the northwest of Ukraine where Moscow Orthodoxy has held the Byzantine "upper hand" since Czarist times. The Roman Catholic presence there today is important, but tiny, after being decimated in and after the WWII years by Hitler and Stalin. Five Orthodox groupings together with the civil authorities signed the document in Rivne, which is the regional capital. It denounces inter-religious violence, calls for an end to Russian aggression in Ukraine, and formulates the wish that there should be one Orthodox Church for Ukraine, circumscribed by the internationally recognized boundaries of the country and that the Church be autocephalous. An official communique from the Moscow Patriarchate in Kyiv soon followed condemning the Memorandum and a young layman in Moscow, who sometimes speaks on behalf of the Moscow Patriarchate observed that obviously the bishops in Rivne had signed under duress. The highest levels of the canonical church condemned the action of their brethren. 

All in all, Orthodoxy shows signs of its profound crisis here in Ukraine and we must beg for God's mercy for our brethren, even though as St. Augustine described his rapport with the Donatist (I believe) they hold us at arm's length and despite all we have in common do not want us as brothers.

This comes on the eve of festivities in Rome to mark the 50th anniversary of Catholic involvement in the ecumenical movement as structured by a document of Vatican II "Unitatis redintegratio".  My friend in his editorial says that ecumenism in Ukraine is dead. He calls for a renewed commitment to doing what the churches and religious communities of Ukraine are able to do together practically within the structure of the Pan-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Communities. I understand his frustration, even if as I have come to understand the reality of Orthodoxy divided here in Ukraine, I have never nurtured illusions about its "Babylonian captivity" going back centuries and under the oppression of various temporal powers, some imperial and some local.

I have no illusions that Catholicism will have it any easier with them than St. Augustine had it in his day with all those rejecting Catholic communion. We pray and extend a hand convinced that the one, visible Church willed by our loving Saviour is, by His will and purpose, built upon the Rock of Peter. 

UT UNUM SINT