Let us pray for our brothers and sisters in the occupied territories who are being punished in the filtration and concentration camps of the Russian occupation authorities. Let us recall in our prayers our imprisoned priests Ivan and Bogdan. May the Lord God, through us, help our imprisoned brothers and sisters to return home, to be with us in the church community in love for their homeland.
Source: UGCC Information Department
His Beatitude Sviatoslav, Head of the UGCC, asked for this in his daily address on the 354th day of the war.
The head of the UGCC is confident that when God calls us to belong to a Ukrainian or other people, he wants us to respond to this call, to love our people, to be interested in their history and culture, and to have a good command of their language.
"True Christian patriotism is love for the land that raised you, which gave you the way to life. One should not despise one's vocation to belong to one's own people," the Head of the UGCC warns.
"The Ukrainian people now have their mission, a Christian task and vocation among other peoples of the world. Ukraine has become the epicenter of world events, and the future of humanity is being forged in it. Thus, we, as loyal sons and daughters of our people, must defend their right to exist with weapons in our hands, but the main motivation of Ukrainian invincibility today is love for our native people," he said.
We thank the Lord God, Says His Beatitude Sviatoslav, who gave us the vocation to be sons and daughters of the Ukrainian people, who today cry, suffer, who are a martyr nation and who gave so many heroes of the Christian faith during the thousand-year history of life in God, Christian life in our lands.
"Today, we ask all the Holy Martyrs of the Ukrainian people to help us to be patriots, good sons and daughters of the people that we are called to accept as a gift and vocation from God, belonging to which is the key to the success of each of us. And the legacy of our national culture today is capital, a treasure from which a new, great, bright future of our people and our motherland will grow," the head of the UGCC added.