A draft large-scale agreement between Ukraine and Vatican posted on the Web
By signing a concordat, Ukraine will have to provide the Catholic Church with privileged conditions in comparison with other confessions.
On February 9, a curious document was published on the Web – a draft large-scale agreement between Ukraine and the Vatican. The text of the document on seven pages was posted by the Three Pole World Chronicles Telegram channel.
“According to lawyers, this document, if signed, puts the Catholic and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Churches in unequal conditions with the other confessions, including the OCU and the UOC, since they are not endowed with the legal status of the State that the Holy See is endowed with. In fact, Ukraine assumes additional obligations with respect to one of the confessions without similar guarantees in relation to the other Churches,” the authors of the channel comment on the concordat.
By the way, singling out any one particular confession directly contradicts Article 5 of the Law of Ukraine “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations”. Furthermore, the authors of the Telegram channel note there is no discrimination against the Catholic Church in Ukraine at present.
Under the concordat, it is planned to create a bilateral commission that will seek the transfer of property lost during the Soviet period to the Catholic Church.
“Religious buildings of the Catholic Church should be restored at the expense of the budget. Catholic educational institutions should be financed from the state budget of Ukraine. A wedding certificate issued after the ceremony in the Catholic or Greek Catholic Church is equated to a secular marriage certificate (other denominations are deprived of such a privilege, according to part 3 of article 21 of the Family Code of Ukraine). Military chaplaincy in the territory of Ukraine will be carried out by a military bishop approved by the Holy See,” these are only some of the provisions to become a reality once the concordat is signed.
According to the source, the ideological inspirer of the concordat is Andriy Yermak, Head of the Office of the President, who in recent years has repeatedly come up with the idea of the Pope’s arrival in Ukraine.
According to the authors of the Three Pole World Chronicles tg-channel, the document will be considered immediately after the presentation of credentials by the new Ambassador of Ukraine to the Vatican, Andriy Yurash, during the state visit of Vladimir Zelensky to the State of the Vatican in 2022.
“Zelensky himself has already been convinced that such a document will give him additional votes in the West of Ukraine – after all, it should be cooler than Petro Poroshenko’s Tomos,” the Telegram channel commented on the document.
Earlier, the UOJ wrote that, according to the head of the OCU, Yurash would agree on the visit of Pope Francis to Ukraine.
