Millions await Pope's visit to the Ukraine

Richard Shaw previews one of the Pontiff's most difficult trips
POPE JOHN PAUL H will be greeted by over two million well-wishers on his longawaited pilgrimage to the Ukraine, which begins tomorrow. His trip, from June 23 to 27 will be the first by a pope to the country.
The papal visit will centre on Lviv and Kiev in the north of the country. More than 600,000 invitations have been sent out for the two ceremonies that will occur in Kiev and over 1.5 million have been issued for the event in Lviv.
The Pope's trip is viewed as another stage in his long journey in search of unity with the Orthodox Church. The Vatican has explained that the Pope's visit will be one of peace, not politics.
Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican secretary for relations with states. speaking at a conference in Rome, sponsored by the Ukrainian Embassy, said: "The Pope is not going to Ukraine on a political visit or to solve the internal problems of the Orthodox Church." The Pope, he added, "is going in pilgrimage to Ukraine with a message of peace and reconciliation, emphasising to all Christians, no matter what their confession or rite, that they can contribute to the good of the country".
As part of this process, the papal visit will see the beatification of 27 Eastern Catholic martyrs. They include Fr Leonid Fedurov, the leader of the Catholic Church in Russia, who was killed by Stalin, after spending 12 years working in labour camps.
Many others suffered horrific deaths under the communist regime. Fr Roman Lysko was sealed alive within the walls of a prison in Lviv, one of the cities the Pope will visit.
Fr Yakym Senkivsky was murdered in 1941, boiled in a prison cauldron.
There has been some controversy about the visit, however. Some Orthodox priests protested in Kiev about the prospective trip. They claimed that the Pope was guilty of "stealing" members of the Orthodox Church for Catholicism. The Theological Commission of the Orthodox Church issued a statement condemning the Pope's visit.
"There is no doubt that in the present situation, the Pope's visit, regardless of its status and form, will not resolve the conflict, but aggravate." it said.
The Byzantine-rite Catholic Church was banned under Soviet rule and the hierarchy sent to gulags. With the return of the Church after the fall of communism, the government passed a law restoring her property. This led to a number of property disputes with the Orthodox Church and some feel this is a greater cause of the Orthodox antagonism than any theological issue.
Catholics account for a large minority of the Ukrainian population, with about five million of the mainly Orthodox population of 50 million being Catholic. Figures for 2000 show that there were 2,522 priests in the Ukraine and there are at present 1,236 seminarians.