Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav calls for support for (the) Ukraine('s revolutionary government).
He's a politically correct wuss (political correctness is a Christian heresy like the Russians being in schism, Your Beatitude), the EU's bitch. No, thanks. I'm Catholic and always will be but he makes Putin look good in comparison. We need a new Constantine (venerated as a saint in the Byzantine Rite), not churchmen like Metropolitan Sviatoslav. Not what I want for the new Ukraine, and I have no problem with Ukrainians wanting to be independent. I am still hoping for a conservative, Catholic-friendly version of Russia, not this. Sure, except for things like this, I'd love it if the Ukrainian Catholic Church became the state or at least national church. People rightly point out the Russian Orthodox Church is Erastian (Eastern Orthodoxy is a state creation that exists to hate the Catholic Church) but so is this, a bane of Eastern Europe. I'm no Communist or schismatic (Russia's now a weird but understandable mix of Soviet nostalgia and Orthodoxy), but Metropolitan Sviatoslav's government has neither my opposition nor my support; in fact it is completely irrelevant to me. Try again, Your Beatitude.
Russia was right to annex the Crimea. The Crimea is Russian because its people want it so. Same principle as the revolution this year in Kiev. The people didn't like something the duly elected government did (Yanukovych got a better from Russia than the EU) so a mob overthrew it. Pot, kettle.
The Kyivan Patriarchate is Orthodox in about the sense the SSPX is Catholic.
If you think the church will get a better deal from the EU, etc., by trying to appeal to their religious-liberty and human-rights rhetoric ("liberté, egalité, fraternité"; "progress, liberalism, and modern civilization"), hiding behind the Jews, Mohammedans, et al. (no, I'm not supporting persecution), rather than standing on the church's truth claim, you're mistaken.
Reminds me of the Anti-Gnostic's point: too many Catholic churchmen will keep hitching their wagons to social democracy to try to get a good deal for the church or themselves. It won't work for the church.
Metropolitan Sviatoslav reminds me of the Ukrainian Catholic priest I heard almost 25 years ago apologizing for "sexist language." (By the way, women don't like male feminists.)
This isn't the principle or the courage that enabled the Ukrainian Catholic Church to survive heroically underground for over four decades in modern times.
Cognitive dissonance: you expect Russian Orthodoxy minus schism and instead get a Byzantine Rite version of the Archbishop of Canterbury ("sharia promotes Ukrainian values — Nostra Aetate!") or the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.
His official title is major archbishop; his predecessor Josyf (Slipyj), a gulag survivor, began using the title of patriarch; fine with me.
The trouble isn't that the Russians believe in a true church; it's that they're not it, only part of an estranged part of it.
The first Eastern Slavs and Eastern Christians I knew well, 30 years ago, were Ukrainian Catholic exiles from World War II; my first traditional Catholic liturgy was Ukrainian.
I get it. A message meant to get some Western traction by appealing to the only language the Western media understands, that of 1789. A mistake to be sure, but I'd have to question its sincerity without deeper confirmation. Catholics, even deeply orthodox Catholics, have been using it seeking mainstream approval or solace for the last 200 years.
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