The Roman Catholic Parish of St.Joseph

The Christians of first centuries called themselves “cruces religiosi”, that meant ones who accepted the religion of the Cross. You can say that from the beginning the tree on which Jesus died began to live Christ’s life, identified with Jesus Christ.

Love to Christ took to love to the Cross. Hatred to Christ takes to the Cross. If you disregard Jesus, you disregard the Cross. The Cross is a stumbling stone for ones and is a sign of love for others.

The illustration to this historical fact is a situation connected with the case of St.Joseph’s temple in Dnipropetrovsk, which still hasn’t been returned to the believers. From time to time hidden, concealed kingdom of the darkness, hatred and lawlessness showed its terrible face, camouflaged with lie and hypocrisy. Sacrilege, violation, contemptuous attitude to spiritual treasures cause our resolved protest against those ones who are responsible for the feeling of citizens’ safety. Here is some information, which I must give to the communities of the Diocese.

At night from the 3 to the 4th March, during the time of Lent, when the Christians respect the Cross of the Lord in a special way, some unknown malefactors demolished the Cross in front of st.Joseph’s temple in Dnipropetrovsk. It is the second incident for the last four weeks. The Cross was dug out from the foundation, then it was broken and stolen. We don’t know the names of the executives of this sacrilege, but they certainly did it consciously. We suppose them to have been sent by somebody. The fact of disappearance of the Cross after its profanation points out on it. The executives of this inhuman crime destroyed the Cross with amazing aggression and cruelty and scattered candles and flowers near the closed door of the temple. It shows that somebody wants nothing to remind that the building with columns on Karl Marx Av., 91 is a Catholic church.

We are upset very much with a range of profanations of the Lord’s Cross, aggression and intimidation of the Roman-Catholics of Dnipropetrovsk. The painful wounding of our religion feelings is also a flagrant breach of the Constitution and the Criminal Code of the Ukraine. It can’t be a way of the solving of the conflict, connected with a problem of the temple. More and more believers all around the world know about the case of st.Joseph’s church in Dnipropetrovsk and join the Roman-Catholics of Dnipropetrovsk in fasting, pray and the action of protest. We announce that in spite of all illegal demands of the American corporation “Dugsbery.Inc” on owning the temple and forcibly stopping the action of our protest, the action will go on till the sacred place of the Catholics is returned.

I order to celebrate the common expiatory Cross Way on Friday on 13th March as excuse for all humiliations, which were done in Dnipropetrovsk.

Let’s kneel in front of the Crucifix as defenders of the Cross and ask for mercy and pardon for those people who don’t see what they are doing and for those ones who know what they are making.

With blessing and pray,
Bishop of Kharkiv-Zaporizhzhia Stanislav Padevski

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under From the life of our parish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.