“Today the voice of the emaciated millions of people invokes the conscience of contemporaries,” UGCC Head

This was emphasized in the Appeal on the occasion of the 80^th anniversary of the great crime against the Ukrainian people – the Holodomor of 1932-33, by the Head and Father of the Ukrainian Greek- Catholic Church, His Beatitude Sviatoslav (Shevchuk).

“This voice should be heard by both the successors of the victims as well as the successors of those who sold and bought the bread taken from them and with it, also their lives.  To hear this voice means to pray and to atone for them,” appealed the UGCC Primate.   

He reminds the faithful that 80 years ago, Ukrainian grain growers, who over the centuries fostered love towards their nurturing earth and through the labor of their hands fed entire nations -- suddenly found themselves totally deprived of bread.  “In one of the harvest years, when the Lord abundantly  granted to Ukrainians the fruit of their own land, this bread was forcibly confiscated and sold, while the peasants, in waves of whole villages, were relegated to the so-called “black lists” – doomed to a slow and terrible death by hunger,” describes UGCC Head.    

Therefore, the artificially engineered famine on the lands of the Breadbasket of Europe 80 years ago is recognized as the genocide of Ukrainians by many countries, notes His Beatitude Sviatoslav, and the memory of it evokes until now the echo of pain in the hearts of millions of people around the world.

He believes that we, the children of the Ukrainian nation, feel this pain especially poignantly, since millions of our brothers and sisters of common ancestry were denied their right of life by the Stalin regime, followed by a Communist rule which during decades systematically and without pardon denied them the right to memory.

“May the Eternal Memory of God that we beseech in the memorial prayers, express itself also in our living national memory about these tragic pages in the history of our native country,” wished the Church Head the faithful and people of good will. 

 UGCC Head delegated all priests to hold memorial services:  on Saturday, November 23^rd -- a Divine Liturgy, and on Sunday, November 24^th a Panakhyda [Requiem Service] for the repose of the souls of the innocently killed by the Holodomor.

He also urged all faithful of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church to light a memorial candle in their homes and to participate in the memorial services and other commemorative community events.

UGCC Department of Information