“Pope Francis personally urged me to bring you his sympathy, his hugs, his prayers, along with his Blessing. He reassures you that you are not alone, that you have a special place in his heart”. This was said by cardinal Leonardo Sandri, prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, in the Divine Liturgy for the Day of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles, celebrated yesterday in Kiev, in the patriarchal cathedral of the Resurrection, one of the places where he stopped during his visit to Ukraine (11-17 July). “The Holy Father – the Prefect added, speaking to the crowd of devotees in the Cathedral – would also like to thank you for the prayers you offered according to his intention during the great recent pilgrimage in St Peter’s Basilica, to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the canonisation of St Josaphat: a martyr for the love of God, a martyr for the unity of the Church, whom we want to follow by not surrendering to any difficulty or to any human power that wants to take away our hope in a fair, honest life, with everyone’s cooperation and conversion, in a home country that is respected in its integrity and inwardly reconciled in its different souls and dimensions”. On Pope Francis’s behalf, card. Sandri gave the medal of the 4^th year of Papacy to His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who thanked the cardinal, pointing out that “communion is not a reality that can only be defined by a canon or by a rule, it is about the living body of Christ that is the Church. For the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Holy Father’s delegate being here is a deep sign of the love that Pope Francis keeps feeling for our people and a balm that is poured onto the wounds of the hearts. We are praying here for our brothers of the Orthodox Church too: we feed on the same Body of Christ, but we cannot do it from the same altar yet. However, we want to testify with joy, all the more so on this day, the Day of Saints Peter and Paul, that communion with the Holy Father is a source of blessing, as experienced by us, who keep feeling his sympathy and his love even when the rest of the international community is speechless before the tragedy of our people”.

At the end of the Divine Liturgy, the Prefect paid tribute to the grave of cardinal Lubomyr Husar, who died a few weeks ago. Along with the nuncio and the major archbishop, cardinal Sandri then flew to Kharkiv, where, welcomed by the exarch, mgr. Vasil Tuchapets, and by the auxiliary bishop of the Latin diocese, mgr. Jan Sobilo, he visited the Caritas agency, run by the Greek Catholic Church, which assists children and adults who have been evacuated since the start of the 2014 fights, mainly from Donetsk, Lugansk and Sloviansk. They receive assistance, humanitarian aids, psychological and social consultancy, over 40,500 of them in three years, with the help of 72 employees and 53 volunteers, in addition to help from several national Caritas agencies and other organisations, including non-ecclesial ones.