Реферат: Catholic

session of the Joint Commission was to be convened at the earliest possible

opportunity. Archbishop Antonio Magrassi of Bari in a press-release said that it

would take place again in his diocesan city on June 8, 1987.

And so it did. The next session of the Joint Commission took place in Bari, in June

1987. The Russian Orthodox Church was unable to attend for technical reasons.

(Technical reasons had prevented our Church from attending the previous meeting

in 1986 too).

The fifth session of the Joint Commission was held from June 19 to 27, 1988, at the

New Valamo Monastery in Finland and discussed the theme “The Sacrament of

Ministry in the Sacramental Structure of the Church, and the importance of the

Apostolic Succession for the Consecration and Unity of the People of God”.

The years between late 80s and early 90s saw the worsening of the relations

between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. The main cause was the inadmissible

violent methods employed by the Greek Catholic churches to restore their legal

parish life after an “underground” existence. This violent process was most painful

for the Orthodox in Western Ukraine (Lvov, Ternopol, Ivano-Frankovsk regions,

Transcarpathia). There the tension was such as to lead to mass disorders, clashes,

seizures of the Orthodox churches when Orthodox communities were forced out of

their places of worship; discrediting campaigns were conducted against the

Orthodox of the Moscow Patriarchate in the press; the Greek Catholic newspapers,

like “Meta” and “I Believe” would openly call them “the fifth column of Moscow”, or

“agents of Russia’s imperial influence”.

It was necessary to exercise every possible effort to change the situation.

Unfortunately, direct contact with the Uniates was impossible, because the Greek

Catholics had left the so-called Quadrennial Commission. That commission was

formed in January 1990 and had among its members representatives of the Moscow

Patriarchate, of the Roman Catholic Church, of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and

Catholics of Eastern Rite from Western Ukraine.

The Uniate members withdrew from the commission under the pressure of the