Рет қаралды 9,331
Christ is born!
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ!
Today is Sunday 5 February 2023 and in Ukraine it is already the 347th day of the great war which the Russian invader and occupier brought to our peaceful Ukrainian land.
Today, thanking the Lord God for giving us this Sunday, God's holy day, we review how our last day, yesterday, and this last night have passed.
Unfortunately, at this very moment, there is a powerful rocket attack on our Kharkiv. There are already reports of Russian rockets hitting the centre of this city of several million. We also learned today that our defenders repelled powerful Russian attacks on nine settlements, from nine directions in the east of our Motherland. Yesterday and last night, our Luhansk region and Donetsk region were burning. We especially pray for the courageous, indomitable defenders of Avdiyivka, our Uhledar and the already legendary Bakhmut.
Yesterday, we also received disturbing news from the Kharkiv region’s city of Izyum. There, seven teenagers were blown up by an anti-personnel PFM-1 mine, and one girl also has a strong mental trauma from what she saw and experienced. We wrap with our prayers the children who, unfortunately, have the danger of contact with explosive substances every day and are exposed to great dangers to their lives and health. We wrap our prayers around the victims of this great disaster that happened yesterday in Izyum and extend our support to them.
Again, the enemy is heavily shelling the border areas of our Sumy region and Chernihiv region. Yesterday, our city of Kherson came under a powerful attack again. We wrap with our love, prayer, and support all those who today have the hardest time, who are suffering, who are in pain, who feel forgotten and abandoned. I call on all our volunteers: be God's hands, be bearers of God's love and mercy, and hurry to those who need our attention the most today.
On this morning, on this holy day of Sunday, we thank the Lord God and the armed forces of Ukraine for the fact that we have endured the last days, for the fact that today we are, we live, we exist, and we fight. And today we want to say again to ourselves and the world: Ukraine is standing. Ukraine is fighting. Ukraine is praying.
Again today we will go to our churches in order to form a visible community of Christ's Church together, to experience our participation in the Divine Liturgy together. Because that is why it is divine, because the Son of God Himself descends from heaven to serve us, like the Good Samaritan comes to touch our wounds with his Body and Blood, to enter into our pains and sufferings. He only wants us to come to Him and accept His service, to be a Eucharistic community of the resurrected Christ present among us today.
And in the same way, we go to prayer and every time we pray the Divine Liturgy, we pray for the well-being of God's holy churches and for the union of all. This is one of the first petitions of the Great Litany of Peace, which is sung by Greek Catholics and Orthodox of various denominations. We don't just hear it, we really want today to take this common prayer of ours as God's commandment and His order, to fulfill in our daily life.
In recent days, we have been reflecting about the state of Christian and inter-Christian relations today, how today Christians of different churches and denominations are trying to heal the wounds of our schisms, divisions, and disagreements. I want to say that our Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the largest Eastern Catholic Church in the world. We preserve our liturgical, spiritual, and canonical heritage of the Byzantine Church, we consider the Church of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to be our mother Church, because the good news of the Holy Gospel came to us from Constantinople. But we are a Church that lives in full and visible communion with the successor of the Apostle Peter-the Holy Father, the Pope of Rome. We, as a Church of the Kyivan tradition, live and testify to the state of the Church in Ukraine, in our lands in which it lived before the division, before the schism between Rome and Constantinople. And we want to embody this thousand-year-old tradition of memory and struggle for unity among Christians even today.
We are aware that the mission of the quest for, and work on, unity among Christians is an integral part of the identity of an Eastern Catholic Church. Because today we testify that it is possible to fully be yourself, preserving all the fullness of the Orthodox faith and tradition, but live this fullness in communion with Universal Christianity. And the Holy Father, the successor of the Apostle Peter, the Pope of Rome, is the minister of the universal unity of the Church of Christ, its visible heart ...
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Ukraine pray!
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† Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church:
• web site ugcc.ua/en
• Facebook / en.ugcc.ua
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