UGCC Begins to Work on Plan of Development for 50 Years
On 2-9 Se
ptember, the Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Greek catholic Church was held in Lviv. By its specific decision, the Synod set up special groups which are to work on developing the vision of UGCC for the next 10, 20 and 50 years. "The next step will be to select means to reach that goal," explained the head of UGCC to journalists. He also added that the groups will have to work very intensively in the next few months in order to design the mentioned mission in the best possible way.
"It has been twenty years since UGCC came out of the underground and we seek to check how far we have gone, how well we managed to revive various institutions, by which our Church lives, and how successful we are in fulfilling our calling to preach and represent Jesus Christ," explained Patriarch Lubomyr.
The Synod dealt with the issues of migration. "We sought to realize that emigration in the history of our Church in the last 150 years has been a very important factor. We talk about four big waves of emigration, which took place in different periods and under different circumstances and for different reasons," noted the head of UGCC as he summed up the results of the Synod.
He stressed that the Church aspires to help them at various levels and added that the members of the Synod tried to look into the history of these emigrations, especially, in the countries "where our emigrants settled down and established their own church and public organizations." Patriarch Lubomyr noted that modern emigrants need even more pastors than those available now, especially, such ones "who would be ready to go to Western Europe, Africa or Asia, be duly trained and realize their calling."
The annual Synod of UGCC was attended by 39 bishops from Ukraine, Western Europe, USA, Canada, Latin America and Australia as well as Bishop Milan (Shashik) of Mukachiv of the Roman Catholic Church and guests from Czech Republic - Bishop Ladyslav (Huchko), Greece - Bishop Dimitrios (Salakhas) and Belarus - Archimandrite Serhii (Gaiek).
The next Synod of Bishops of UGCC will be held in Kuritiba (Brazil). Its main themes will be practical questions of pastoral care of emigrants and development of specific measures to implement the evangelization strategy of UGCC.
