Creating an ad-hoc Committee to heal past wounds, to allow the purification of memory, and to imagine a future together. Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, proposed this yesterday with regard to the issue of Ukraine and the Greek Catholic Church raised by Metropolitan Hilarion from the Moscow Patriarchate at a Conference in Fribourg yesterday, one year after Pope Francis’ meeting with Patriarch Kirill. In a written statement released today by the Institute for Ecumenical Studies of the University of Fribourg, added to the official speech, Card. Koch points out: “As regards the painful situation in Ukraine, especially the relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, I believe that one fruit of the meeting in Havana could and should be the resumption of a multi-layered dialogue. From an historical point of view, I believe it is essential that we work together, in the framework of an ad-hoc Committee, on the wounds sustained by both sides in the past. Such work will certainly be hard and long, but it will allow for ‘a purification of memory’. Without the healing of memory it is difficult to imagine a common future. At the same time, as Pope Francis recently said: ‘To look back is helpful, and indeed necessary, to purify our memory, but to be fixated on the past, lingering over the memory of wrongs done and endured, and judging in merely human terms, can paralyze us and prevent us from living in the present’. (Homily, 25 January 2017)”. “For this reason – the cardinal explains – we also have to look to the future and establish a dialogue on the present challenges, which do not seem to be theological in nature, but rather national and political, in order to find mutually acceptable forms of cohabitation, as stated in the Joint Declaration. I do hope from the bottom of my heart that, despite the current difficulties, the establishment of such dialogue will be possible”.