Pope Celebrates Ukrainian Mass with International Emphasis

Pope John Paul II's first Mass in Ukraine demonstrated his broad appeal to Christians of many languages and nations gathered at Chayka Airport Sunday morning.

As he has since his arrival in Ukraine, the Pope spoke mostly in Ukrainian but nine other European languages were used for the prayers of the faithful and the final greetings. Dotting the crowd of a hundred thousand were banners welcoming the Pope in Polish, Romanian, and Russian, a common language in Kyjiv and eastern Ukraine. Because of the large attendance, the airfield just outside the city was selected for this Latin Rite Mass and the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy on Monday.

But most important of all was the use of Ukrainian in the Latin Rite liturgy. "Until now the Ukrainian texts for the Latin Rite have only been provisional", says Fr. Kszystof Homa, a Jesuit teaching at the Lviv Theological Academy. "The use of these texts by the Holy Father now gives them a new status."

The ecumenical nature of the Mass was clear from the beginning when the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kyjiv-Zhytomyr Jan Purvinsky welcomed the many Orthodox, Protestants and non-Christians who had come "out of respect for the moral authority of the Pope". Many Byzantine-Rite Catholic bishops joined the Pope on the large altar platform symbolically haped like a ship. President Kuchma and his principal ministers sat in the first row of the audience.

As he has before, in his homily the Pope drew upon the history of the Church of Kyjiv-Rus and its origin at a time when "the Church of Constantinople and the Church of Rome were still in full communion." The use of both Latin and Greek in the ritual parts of Sunday's Mass highlighted this common heritage.

Celebrating the Feast of St. John the Baptist, in his sermon the Pope recalled the baptism of the nation under King Volodymyr in 988. "The Baptism which took place here, in Kyjiv, inaugurated the thousand-year history of Christianity in the lands of today's Ukraine and in the whole region."

The Pope likened Kyjiv itself to St. John the Baptist, the "precursor of the Lord" among many peoples. From Kyjiv, the Gospel was brought forth "in the land of the ancient Rus, then in the lands of Eastern Europe and, later, beyond the Urals, in the lands of Asia."

For many Ukrainians, the Pope himself has parallels to John the Baptist, since his broad proclamations in Poland prepared the way for the fall of communism and the transformation of Eastern Europe. The diocese of Kyjiv-Zhytomyr, like the nation of Ukraine, is now celebrating its 10th anniversary of official freedom.

In addition to the ritual bread and wine, gifts brought forward at the offertory included handwritten prayerbooks from the underground church and a painting of a Franciscan sister who founded an ecumenical community that works with blind children.

24.06.2001 (17:12) // Religious Information Service of
24. juni 2001