Paul Keenan
The task of the Catholic Church is not only to teach people how to pray, but how to live authentically Christian lives, two leaders of the Ukrainian Catholic Church said.
The Church’s ministers also have an obligation to accompany, support and minister to their followers in the midst of strife and even danger, said Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, major archbishop of Kiev-Halych.
Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, the 81-year-old retired head of the Church, said he is “convinced that the Churches have to play a very important role in the social development of society”, in order to help “make up for what has been lost in the past” under communism.
Machinations
“We do not wish to take part in political machinations, political actions, but we wish to bring up the level of religiosity of the people so that they would try, as Christians consciously trying to live out a Christian life, to build up their state,” the cardinal said.
This ‘revolution of human dignity,’ he said, would not last without the participation of the Churches, not in politics, but in “preaching justice, preaching truthfulness, preaching desire to help one another in daily social life”.