UGCC Primate: Today UGC is united more than ever

“Our church has no divisions. A division is when some bishops, priests and laity of the UGCC depart from the unity with the Catholic Church. Fortunately, this is not the situation we have in the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, so today we are united more than ever,” His Beatitude Sviatoslav, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, said in an interview during a press conference held on November 11, 2011, on the Philadelphia U.S. radio station. Head of the UGCC noted that from the side of the Russian Orthodox Church there were many attempts to spread the opinion that the UGCC, which emerged from the underground, was a new creation. “There were groups who attempted to appropriate the name of the Greek Catholic Church, in particular, Dognal’s sect. So we made arrangements to defend ourselves, in recent years we have even received from the state a patent for the exclusive right to use the name UGCC,” said the head of the UGCC. Finally, His Beatitude Sviatoslav (Shevchuk) thanked the Ukrainian diaspora in America with for its all-round support to the Church in Ukraine during the last 20 years and said that he “in his pastoral work will contribute to the unity of the Church throughout the world where there are faithful of the UGCC.”  

UGCC Information Department