Lviv, Mar. 27, 2007 (CWNews.com) - Responding to a personal appeal from Cardinal Marian Jaworski, three Catholic women have ended a hunger strike that they had held at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Lviv, Ukraine.
The three women, former parishioners of St. Mary Magdalene, were demanding that the government give the church over to the use of Latin-rite Polish Catholics living in the city. The church is currently serving as a municipal concert hall.
The controversy at St. Mary Magdalene echoes numerous disputes over the ownership and use of Catholic parish properties that were seized by the country's former Communist government. The case is unusual, however, in that this parish belonged to the Latin-rite Catholic archdiocese, headed by Cardinal Jaworksi, and many of the parishioners were ethnic Poles; the parish-property disputes in Ukraine have more typically involved Byzantine Catholic churches.