What is the mark of identity of the UGCC? To be Galician? I tell you as the Major Archbishop of Kyiv, no! There are many who want to make our Church into a Galician enclave in the Western part of Ukraine. His Beatitude Lubomyr once said something very interesting: “we need to put aside the heresy of being just Galician.” [Let me assure you, I say this with all respect, being a Galician myself.] Our identity, the identity of our Church is faith in the salvific things that our God has placed in the history of the Kyivan Church and all the good things and gifts and treasures from God: theological, liturgical, artistic.

Today we must spread these to the whole world. And today when our missionaries leave the Lviv Theological Seminary [where the homily is being given] to occupied areas, in Crimea, or to Melbourne or to India, they can think to themselves… I am going to find [seek out, like lost sheep] Ukrainians, I am going to call back the lost sheep of Ukraine.

But Christ is calling us to something higher. He says go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This is what it means to be a faithful member of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church. Within the richness of the Kyivan Church there is much to be found, there are such deep roots. We need to open the Kyivan Church to other languages, other cultures, other peoples—this gift of the Spirit that the Lord gave to our once suffering, crucified, but today resurrected and glorified Church.