The heresy of nationalism is an obstacle to the agreement of the Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic Churches

The most famous criminal, derived from a family of Greek Catholic clergymen, was Stepan Bandera, son of a priest Andrij Bandera, chaplain and officer of the Halytska Army, fighting against the resurgent Poland. Young Stepan, brought up by his father in the spirit of Ukrainian nationalism, organized in the interwar period many terrorist actions, of which two were the loudest: Minister of Internal Affairs Bronisław Pieracki and Deputy Tadeusz Hołówka. At the same time, he became the leader of one of the two fractions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), on the basis of which the war a genocidal Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was established during the war. The Greek Catholic church after the creation of independent Ukraine in 1991 was again fascinated by the nationalistic ideology. Therefore, along the banks of the Dniester and the Dnieper, the mentioned Stepan Bandera is presented to young people as a model to follow. The authorities are both secular and church authorities. The Greek Catholic bishops also consecrate UPA monuments, which in a special way hurts the families of the victims. For this reason, declarations of reconciliation, incumbent on the lips of the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics, Archbishop Świętosław Szewczuk from Kiev, are considered by Poles to be unreliable. The more so because the Ukrainian leaders try to distort the truth about the genocide. Visiting Poland in 2013, on the 70th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in the Volyn, he avoided meeting the families of the murdered. He did not invite them to panichida, a funeral service in the church in Warsaw, although he invited state and party dignitaries. He did not pray for the murders of the victims, although he was also in the Lublin region, dusted with the blood of the killed by the UPA. It is worth recalling the bl. Bishop Grzegorz Chomyszyn (1867-1945), who prophetically drew attention to the dangerous features of ethical nihilism, as well as the hatred inherent in the ideology of nationalism, which in the recent past led to the terrible genocide in the Borderlands. In this connection, he warned the people: “Nationalism began to arouse the characteristics of a pagan spirit in us, because it introduces the heathen ethics of hatred, orders to hate everyone who is of a different nationality, and even to refuse to help them and show mercy on their misfortune. This is contrary to Christian ethics, for Christ has commanded, by his word and by his example, to love his neighbors and not only his friends and his own but also personal enemies and people of foreign nationality”. He warned the leaders: “But not only did the pagan spirit begin to breathe our Ukrainian nationalism. It's getting even worse, the signs of a kind of Satanism have appeared on the background of Ukrainian nationalism”.