(This is indeed Orthodox rebuttal.--R)
http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/mod/ne ... le_id=7247
Ukrainian Orthodox Church accuses the Uniates of ‘base ingratitude’
Interfax
Kiev, March 9, Interfax - The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has issued an appeal on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Greek-Catholic’s return to Orthodoxy, condemning slanderous and aggressive actions by some Uniates towards the Orthodox Church.
The document condemns ‘the attempts to blacken the actions of the 1946 Council of Lvov’, in which 80% of the Uniate clergy came over to the Orthodox Church.
This Council, the appeal states, ‘is presented as an action of the atheistic regime aimed to destroy the Greek-Catholic Church in Galicia with the help of the Orthodox. A situation is artificially created, in which the Orthodox find themselves forced to prove themselves innocent of the crimes they did not commit’.
‘Does it (the Greek-Catholic Church - IF) have the moral right today to blame the Church which, having admitted the Greek Catholics to its fold in the post-war time, saved them from total physical extermination, enabled them to live a full church life and trained several generations of the clergy in its schools?’ the authors of the appeal ask.
According to the Ukrainian Church, the Uniates have recompensed for it with ‘base ingratitude’. ‘Through passivity and sometimes direct assistance of the local authorities Orthodox dioceses were crushed in Galicia. Divine services were disrupted and churches were captured by force. Can such means of ‘restoration of historical justice’ be morally justified - this is something to be judged by the Lord God’, the appeal states.
At the same time, its authors have underlined that the Church ‘by no means justifies the historical circumstances and the totalitarian Soviet past’, in which the 1946 Council of Lvov was held. But the Church, just as she did before, anathematizes ‘the lawless actions’ of the 1596 Uniate Council of Brest for joining Rome.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko, in his letter to the faithful of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church on the occasion of this significant date, has deplored the interference of the totalitarian state in church affairs, noting that ‘it was a time of cruel reprisal against those whose faith and patriotism could not be shaken by the totalitarian machine’ and that ‘the revival of the Church after half a century of prosecution has shown that true faith cannot be destroyed’.
According to the president, ‘the dramatic pages in the history of the Ukrainian people should teach us tolerance and cooperation in the name of social peace and harmony’.
(And when will this appointee of mr. soros acknowledge the totalitarian repressions, intolerance and brutality of the unions of brest, uzhgorod & lvov?!--R)
