Orthodox protest as Ukraine Catholics move church to Kiev

KIEV: Ukraine’s Uniate Church transferred its seat Sunday to Kiev in a move rekindling ancient tension between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church and condemned by 1,000 demonstrators as an assault on the Moscow-based church that has held sway here for centuries. Addressing his flock in an open-air mass outside a church being built for followers of Ukraine’s Uniate, or Graeco-Catholic, faith, the newly-arrived head of the church, Cardinal Lyubomir Husar, appealed for reconciliation. But Russian Orthodox faithful estimated by police to number over 1,000 protested near the site of the mass and denounced the move of the seat of the Uniate church from the western city of Lviv to the capital, calling it a Western effort to run roughshod over local Eastern traditions. Both the Uniate church and the Russian Orthodox Church are Christian but the present-day split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Roman Catholicism, traditionally dated back to the year 1054, remains a sensitive issue in Ukraine. afp

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