Columnists

Si vis pacem – para bellum

By |

On February 12, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany reached an agreement in Minsk, Belarus, on a new ceasefire in Ukraine (The Ukrainian Weekly, February 15). The 13-point document replaces the Minsk agreement of September 5, 2014, which it resembles. Among other things, it calls for the removal of heavy weapons. The crucial monitoring of the Russian-Ukrainian border, however, depends on a political settlement acceptable to Russia, and in any case will not be possible at least until next year. The Crimea is not even mentioned.

Columnists

Valentine verities from Vienna

By |

It was stern grey November, and Vienna’s pillared palaces and government edifices could barely be discerned against the somber sky. The capital was dense with diplomats, journalists and human-rights activists from all over Europe and North America come to attend yet another international conference. Among them was a throng of diaspora Ukrainians and recent exiles, pleading the cause of Ukrainian dissidents. Packed into presentable quarters at the Marriott on Park Ring, we lobbied the delegations and squeezed into the press conferences, linking up with the Baltic and Jewish lobbies. A famous ex-dissident would drop in occasionally to tell salty jokes while breakfasting on vodka and Gauloises.

Columnists

The fate of objects

By |

Do you collect Ukrainian folk art? Is your house crammed with Hutsul rugs, ceramic cups and saucers, vases, carved and inlaid wooden bowls and boxes, pysanky, embroidered shirts and pillows? Permit me, then, an indiscreet question. What will happen to it all when you die? Do you think your descendants will preserve it for eternity?

Premium content

A future after 50? The first half-century of the Ukrainian Catholic patriarchal movement

By |

PART II
Ends and means

Recognition (or creation) of a patriarchate was not the movement’s only goal. In accord with the Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, the patriarchal movement also sought to revive the Kyivan-Byzantine tradition and ecclesiastical culture. Thus, on the parish level it advocated the return of traditional liturgical practices such as infant communion and the elimination of “Latinizations” such as kneeling. Its members opposed the mandatory clerical celibacy imposed on their clergy in North America.2 They protested against the introduction of the Gregorian liturgical calendar in place of the Julian, which prompted impassioned demonstrations in Chicago in October-December 1964. While the patriarchal movement did not object to the replacement of Church Slavonic by modern Ukrainian as a liturgical language, following the Second Vatican Council’s 1964 Instruction on the Liturgy, it strongly opposed the replacement of Ukrainian by English.