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Ukraine-Vatican relations to be discussed at international conference

A series of international conferences “Ukraine and the Vatican” will be conducted this year on the initiative of the Ukrainian scholarly community with the assistance of certain state and Church organizations of Ukraine, reports RISU. The first conference “Ukrainian –Vatican relations in the context of social and inter-confessional problems” is to be held on 28-29 March 2008 at the Department of Religious Studies and Theology of the V. Stefanyk’s Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk. The following conferences are to be held in Odessa (October 2008), Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia and other cities of Ukraine as well as in Rome.

The conferences are expected to bring together experience and knowledge of religious study experts and theologians, historians, archivists, diplomats, state officials, journalists, public figures, politicians and writers not only from Ukraine, but also Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Russia, Belarus, and other countries.

According to a report of the Catholic Media Center, in defining the topics for the scholarly research and conferences, the organizers focused on objective consideration of historical, spiritual, cultural, political, international-diplomatic and theological aspects of the relations between Ukraine and the Vatican. Such approaches are conditioned by the modern Ukrainian reality, as the Ukrainian society still shows evidence of a biased attitude toward the Vatican, which is often caused not only by the propagation by certain circles in Ukraine of a negative, and politically motivated view on the role of the Vatican in Ukrainian history, but also by the lack of the objective, scientifically grounded knowledge of the issue. The organizers pay special attention to the “ignorance and bias of journalists, most of whom are strongly influenced by myths about the place of the Vatican in Ukrainian history.”

At the first conference in Ivano-Frankivsk, a wide spectrum of issues is to be discussed, including Ukrainian-Vatican relations, their status, problems and prospects; globalization and European integration from Ukraine’s and the Vatican’s point of view. Participants will also discuss the issue of the social doctrine of Catholicism: its doctrinal dimension and practice in its international and Ukrainian perspectives, modern Ukrainian emigration problems, modern tendencies of international Christian Youth movements, and uniatism in the Catholic Church’s documents, etc.

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[03/09/2008]

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