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ROME - One of the most articulate prelates in Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church believes that by visiting their onetime mother church in Rome today, Pope Francis is speaking to the people of his violence-scarred country, certainly, but he’s also delivering a clear message to somebody else: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“He’s sending a signal to Putin,” said Bishop Borys Gudziak, who heads the Ukranian Greek Catholic Eparchy of Paris, and who’s a Harvard PhD and former rector and president of the Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv.

What’s that message to the Russian leader? “That violence and aggression are unacceptable,” Gudziak said. “That I’m with the people who are suffering.”

Pope Francis’s pilgrimage to the minor basilica of Santa Sophia will take place Sunday afternoon, following an invitation by the vibrant, mostly expat Ukrainian community gathered there. He will be welcomed by Ukrainian Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, major archbishop of Kiev-Halych and head of the UGCC, the largest of the 22 Eastern churches loyal to Rome.

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Francis’s visit to Santa Sophia, Guziak told Crux over the phone on Saturday, is one to a church and a people going through a war. Yet when it comes to talking about that war, he can’t avoid revisiting the past 30 years of Ukrainian history.

For the past three decades, he said, Ukraine as well as other post-Soviet countries have been emerging from a “terrible, traumatic, genocidal, totalitarian experience,” and undergoing a healing process that isn’t like “Nescafe, [where you can] mix water and powder and get instant satisfaction.”

The moral depravation of a police state, the bishop said, gave way to corruption - present everywhere to some extent, he said, but “particularly problematic in all the former totalitarian countries.”

“Claiming their God-given human dignity,” Guziak said, in 2013 and 2014, millions of people rose up and demonstrated peacefully for an end to this corruption, in defense of liberty, freedom of speech and in the media, and justice in the courts, the political process and electoral contests.

“This revolution of dignity had a Paschal quality, in the sense that over 100 innocent, unarmed protesters were slaughtered in a Christ-like manner,” he said. “The sacrifice of the so-called ‘Heavenly 100’ led to a political schism, and the president fled to Russia.”

The response of Putin, according to Guziak, was to block the development of this movement of dignity. In order to impede it from spilling over to Russia, Gudziak said, Putin’s strategy has been to discredit it in Ukraine by rendering Ukraine a failed state.

In March 2014, Gudziak said, “came the annexation of Crimea, and in April-May a war was instigated, an invasion.”

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2018/01/28/