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Last Updated: 20 February 2015

CWN - As he received an honorary degree at a Turkish university, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople reflected on peacemaking, ecology, and the economy.

“Orthodoxy is committed to ecology; it is the ‘green’ Church par excellence,” said Patriarch Bartholomew, who holds a primacy of honor among the Eastern Orthodox churches. “We believe that the roots of the environmental crisis are not primarily economic or political, nor technological, but profoundly and essentially religious, spiritual and moral.”

“The most serious contemporary threat of the culture of solidarity is economism, the fundamentalism of market and profit,” he continued, adding:

We resist the transformation of society in a gigantic market, the subordination of the human person to the tyranny of the needs, of consumerism, the identification of “being” with “having,” of dignity with property. We demand the respect of social parameters in economy, which are the basis for a life in freedom and dignity; we work for the protection of fundamental human rights and for the establishment of justice and peace.

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Last Updated: 20 February 2015

CWN - The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church emphasized that Ukraine is not experiencing a civil war but a foreign invasion.

“We have an aggression of a foreign country against the Ukrainian citizens and Ukrainian state,” Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said in an interview with the Zenit news agency.

“We have almost two million refugees, right now in Ukraine,” he added. “140,000 children are among those who are the victims. So we are witnessing the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in Eastern Europe after the end of the Second World War.”

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Last Updated: 20 February 2015

CWN - Coptic Catholics paid tribute to the 21 Copts killed in Libya, as they dedicated the first Catholic church to open in Sinai.

“The Church in Egypt has been strengthened by the murder of our brothers in Libya,” said Bishop Youssef Aboul-Kheir of Sohag. The videotape of the brutal killings—clearly showing the victims saying the name of Jesus Christ as they died—was released on the same day as the dedication of the new church.

Our Lady of Peace church in Sharm el-Sheikh, a Sinai resort town, was built with financial support from Aid to the Church in Need. The church was built when Susanne Mubarak-- the wife of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was educated in Catholic schools-- ensured that bureaucratic obstacles to construction were removed. Patriarch Ibrahim I Sidrak, head of the 200,000-member strong Egyptian Coptic Catholic Church, presided over the consecration ceremony.

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Last Updated: 20 February 2015

CWN - Pope Francis expressed his solidarity with the people affected by continued violence in Ukraine, but stopped short of condemning Russian-backed separatists, in meetings with the country’s bishops on February 20.

In a prepared statement that was distributed to all the Ukrainian bishops, the Pope lamented the conflict that “continues to claim many innocent victims and to cause great suffering to the entire population.” However, breaking from his prepared text, he said that he is pained by calls for the “defeat” of rebels or a “victory” for Ukrainian independence. “Those are not the right word,” the Pope said. “The only right word is peace.”

In his statement the Pope said:

In this period I am particularly close to you in my prayers for the deceased and for all those who have been afflicted by violence, with my plea that the Lord might grant peace soon, and with my appeal to all interested parties to implement joint agreements and to respect the principle of international law, and especially to observe the recently signed armistice and all other commitments that are conditions for avoiding a resumption of hostilities.

The Pope said that the bishops, as citizens, have every right to express their opinions on the country’s difficulties. But he said they should speak out “not in the sense of promoting concrete political action, but in the indication and reaffirmation of the values that constitute the binding element of Ukrainian society.”

The Pope’s insistence on peace negotiations, and the absence of any affirmation of Ukrainian independence, was undoubtedly a disappointment to some Ukrainian prelates, notably including those of the Byzantine-rite Ukrainian Catholic Church. In earlier meetings with the Secretariat of State, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kiev had said that the first duty of Church leaders is to tell the truth about the conflict, which he has characterized as an invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. “This is what the citizens of Ukraine expect today from the Holy See as the highest moral authority,” the Ukrainian prelate said.

Pope Francis held separate audiences for the Ukrainian bishops of the Roman rite and those of the Byzantine rite. All of the bishops received the same written statement, however.

In that statement the Pope alluded to conflicts between the two Catholic rites, saying that he was “personally saddened to hear that there are incomprehensions and that harm has been done.” He reminded them: “Whether Greek-Catholics or Latins, you are sons of the Catholic Church, which has been subject to martyrdom in your land too.”

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Last Updated: 20 February 2015

CWN - The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church emphasized that Ukraine is not experiencing a civil war but a foreign invasion.

“We have an aggression of a foreign country against the Ukrainian citizens and Ukrainian state,” Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said in an interview with the Zenit news agency.

“We have almost two million refugees, right now in Ukraine,” he added. “140,000 children are among those who are the victims. So we are witnessing the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in Eastern Europe after the end of the Second World War.”

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Last Updated: 19 February 2015

CWN - Christians in the Middle East are experiencing “the fifth year of the Way of the Cross,” Melkite Catholic Patriarch Gregory III Laham said in his Lenten message.

The Melkite Patriarch said that the suffering of Christians in the region is one of “the greatest tragedies of history — not just in the region, but in the world — since World War Two.” He said that the Church is struggling to help believers, “as if we wash the feet of those who are suffering as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples.”

Saying that Christians in the Middle East are enduring “universal suffering,” the Syrian-born Patriarch pointed to Lebanon as an illustration of how the bloodshed in Syria and Iraq have affected the entire region. Lebanon, he said, has received waves of refugees over the years, most recently accommodating Christians who have fled their homes in Syria and Iraq. Today there are 1.5 million refugees living in Lebanon, stretching that small country’s resources to the breaking point.