skip to main |
skip to sidebar
(UGCC) - On November 29 in Lviv, December 13 in Ivano-Frankivsk, December 22 in Ternopil Hierarchical Liturgies will be held, during which the decrees on the establishment of the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil-Zboriv metropolitanates of the UGCC. Patriarch Sviatoslav (Shevchuk), Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, said this on November 8, during a web conference on tochka.net.
The Synod of Bishops decided to create three new metropolitans. The Lviv Metropolitanate will include the Lviv Archeparchy and the Stryi, Sambir-Drohobych, and Sokal-Zhovkva eparchies; the Ivano-Frankivsk Metropolitanate, Ivano-Frankivsk and Kolomyia-Chernivtsi eparchies; Ternopil-Zboriv, Ternopil-Zboriv and Buchach eparchies. The first metropolitans of the newly established metropolitanates will be Archbishop Ihor (Voznyak), Archbishop of Lviv, Bishop Volodymyr (Viytyshyn), Eparch of Ivano-Frankivsk, and Bishop Vasyl (Semeniuk) Eparch of Ternopil-Zborowski.
According to His Beatitude Sviatoslav, the establishment of new metropolitanates is a very important step in the natural development of the UGCC toward patriarchy. "Today in Ukraine there is a single metropolitanate of Kyiv and Halych based in Kyiv. With such a structure, our metropolitanate reflects the state of church that we had at the time of Kyivan Rus'. There was one metropolitan, the de facto head of the national church, who had, respectively, authority over the bishops on his territory. For more than a thousand years our church has developed, particularly in Ukraine. Today this natural state of development of the church structure needs to be improved. Therefore, in order to provide better pastoral care for our faithful, according to the decision of the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC and with the blessing of the Apostolic See, we created three new metropolitanates," the head of the UGCC.
In addition, the primate of the UGCC said that every metropolitan will have the right to convene a Metropolitanate's Synod, but for the decisions of synod to be valid, they need approval from the Major Archbishop.
It should be noted that now the UGCC will have seven metropolitanates. In addition to the newly created ones, another metropolitanate in Ukraine is the Kyiv and Halych Metropolitanate, headed by His Beatitude Sviatoslav. It consists of Kyiv Archeparchy, Donetsk-Kharkiv, Odesa-Crimea and Lutsk exarchates. In addition, the UGCC has the Przemysl and Warsaw Metropolitanate in Poland, the Philadelphia Metropolitanate in the United States, and the Winnipeg Metropolitanate in Canada.
