Sebastopol Catholics Ask for Church to Be Returned

SEBASTOPOL — The Roman Catholic parish of St. Clement in Sebastopol made another address to the city council with the request to have a church returned where a cinema has been located since the war. On 24 December, 2009, the senior priest of the church, Fr. Yurii held a press conference on the problem.

The essence of our request to the authorities to return the church is simply to restore justice, both social and civic, for if there are successors, parishioners and the church, a religious building, a holy place for part of the Sebastopol community, why not return it?” According to the priest, “an idea was voiced a few times that there was no church, that only ruins were left and the cinema was built on the foundations thereof after the war. But this is not true,” said the priest.

According to Fr. Yurii, the issue is “being settled” for 12 years now. “First of all, there was the following manipulation: before the mid 1990s the church was owned by the state and the state administration had the prerogative in the question of returning it,” noted the priest.  But the “officials did not have the guts to use their powers and return the church to the Sebastopol Catholics. They did transfer it, but in a very strange, still not completely understood way: allegedly to communal ownership, the settlement of the issue having been entrusted in the deputies of the city council,” added the priest.

According to UNIAN, the minister stressed “The question was not even included in the agenda of the city council session of October 2009 and we received a response that our request was not supported by the deputies and that it remains expedient to use the Friendship Cinema, meaning that our church is sill like a cinema.”