There Will Be No Joint Statement by Greek and Roman Catholics about Volyn Tragedy
There will be no joint appeal of Ukrainian Catholics of Eastern and Western rites dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Volyn tragedy. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) and Roman Catholic Church (RCC) in Ukraine could not agree on a single position, Istorychna Pravda reports with reference to the Polish site about religion Wiara.pl, which took a comment from the Metropolitan of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki.
Archbishop Mokrzycki said that the RCC and UGCC failed to come up with a common position. According to the hierarch, the RCC in Ukraine will try to appeal to the faithful with a separate appeal on the Volyn tragedy.
At the same time, Archbishop Mokrzycki noted that there is little discussion about this topic in Ukraine.
In January this year, Polish media with reference to the Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the UGCC reported that Ukrainian Greek and Roman Catholics are preparing a joint statement to mark the 70th anniversary of the Volyn tragedy – “to heal the wounds of the past, so they won’t poison our future."
In June 2011, it was reported that the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada and the Polish Sejm plan to adopt a joint statement on the events of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict during World War II. The statement has yet to be adopted.
The Volyn tragedy was the mutual ethnic cleansing of Ukrainian and Polish populations carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Polish Home Army with the participation of Polish battalions of the Schutzmannschaft and Soviet partisans in 1943 during World War II in Volyn.
It is part of the large-scale Polish-Ukrainian interethnic conflict of the 1940s. There are different versions of events in Volyn, which resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Poles and thousands of Ukrainians. In Poland, the quite powerful right-winged Kresowy movement uses the events of the 1940s to depict Ukrainians as cutthroats and instigators.
Recently in Lublin, Polish historians discussed the Volyn tragedy without the participation of Ukrainians. The director of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland unilaterally places the blame for the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic conflict of the 1940s on the Ukrainians, calling the tragedy a "massacre" and "genocide."
