by Antonina Matkowski
The essence of a 4,500-word statement released on January 4th by a special subcommittee of Roman Catholic bishops in the United States is that they reject the «Melting Pot» theory as a disastrous process for this nation. A quotation from the Bishops’ statement read as follows:
Any measure of reflection would indicate that this would not, and indeed should not, be the future for America. The total homogenization of people within a nation is no less disastrous, as history shows, than that same process among nations.
An important note for Ukrainians is that the Bishops call attention to the discrimination in the Church against Eastern Catholics, the «ecclesiastical minorities.» They note that «despite the rapidly increasing numbers of such fellow Catholics in our country, discrimination against them in the valid expressions of their traditional customs, practices and discipline seems to persist.» They offer specific actions as a solution, such as, providing parish worship and religious education activities in languages other than English, teaching about the Church’s broad range of cultural experience in Catholic schools, and including the history of ethnic communities in seminary training.
Unfortunately, it has been the Ukrainian Catholic bishops and priests who have been Latinizing, Romanizing and Americanizing the Ukrainian Church in the United States when it served their personal convenience and ambitions. They offer Ukrainians a counterfeit Church called «Byzantine» which is merely a branch of the Roman Church. It is not the Ukrainian Autonomous Church as baptized by St. Wolodymyr one thousand years ago.
Supported by the Bishops’ Statement, the Ukrainian laity in the United States should take this golden opportunity to clear the slate and rid themselves of the looming counterfeit Ukrainian Church by demanding that the Pope and the Roman Curia abide by the law, the Decrees on Easter Catholic Churches. This would take some of the burden off the shoulders of our Patriarch Cardinal Josyf I Slipyj, who has fought so valiantly for these rights for the last 18 years.
The Ukrainian laity would then be giving its posterity an opportunity to identify with legitimate roots, we then might see more young people in the seminaries and convents. The young intuitively sense a counterfeit.
