The Ukrainian Patriarch is once again in the news. On November 12, 1975, the Rome office of the Catholic News Agency (NCNS) issued the following news story headlined:
CARDINAL SLIPYJ AGAIN SEEKS VATICAN RECOGNITION AS PATRIARCH Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, Ukrainian Rite Major Archbishop of Lviv USSR, has repeated his cause for recognition by the Vatican of the Ukrainian Rite Patriarchate.
In a sermon at the church of St. Sophia here, the Cardinal resident in Vatican, claimed, that the Ukrainian Rite Patriarchate already exists even without Vatican recognition. «This is my position» the Cardinal told the congregation. «As I told His Holiness Pope Paul VI, if you don’t recognize the patriarchate, somebody else will — the next Pope or the Pope after him! If another Pope does not recognize it — the others will.»
The Cardinal then referred to the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow and Rumania, noting that their existence doesn’t depend on recognition from elsewhere. The Cardinal, who was for 18 years confined in Soviet labor camps, said that the Soviets twice offered to make him Orthodox religious leader «of the whole of the Ukraine and more» but that he refused and was returned to prison. According to Ukrainian sources the Cardinal feels disappointed, honors which he once rejected for the sake of the Catholic Church are being withheld from him now by that Catholic Church.
