The state and the church in Ukraine should resume dialog, former Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) Lubomyr Husar, who resigned on February 10 due to ill health, has said.
"The authorities don’t want to talk to us… For the whole year, there was no meeting with the president or other government officials – a serious meeting where we could have discussed our affairs… This is a problem that we should resolve very calmly, without any passions and excessive politicking," he at a press conference in Kyiv on Thursday.
Husar also noted that various religious confessions currently have problems.
"Everybody is complaining that one church is currently given a lot of privileges, allegedly because our president is a member of this church," he said.
"I am very glad that our president is a religious man, that he belongs to a particular church and that he comes to this church to worship," Husar said.
At the same time, he noted that other churches have a number of other problems. In his opinion, there are problems facing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate, which exerts pressure on priests in order to make them switch to the jurisdiction of Moscow Patriarchate.
Husar also said that the UGCC also has problems and that it had faced them for a long time. He said that law enforcement agencies had encouraged the clergy to work with them.
"This is also dangerous for the church, as it undermines credibility in it," he said.
While describing the situation between the state and the church in general, Husar said that the Ukrainian authorities "are doing nothing but repeat the mistake of centuries."
