Pope to arrive in religiously divided Ukraine

Small groups of Orthodox believers prayed today for protection against what they consider an insidious Catholic influence as Pope John Paul II headed to predominantly Orthodox Ukraine, and Orthodox leaders again ruled out a meeting with the pontiff.

The Vatican has called the trip, starting today, a mission of ‘‘peace and reconciliation’’ and hopes it will help calm inter-church tensions and even pave the way for a pilgrimage to Russia like Ukraine, a predominantly Orthodox country.

Yet Russian Orthodox Church leaders in Moscow, who also control the majority of Orthodox parishes in Ukraine, have rejected the pontiff’s overtures to overcome the schism that has divided the main branches of Christianity for close to 1,000 years.

They accuse Catholics of aggressive missionary activity among the Orthodox and of seizing Orthodox churches and other property in Ukraine.

’’The pontiff’s visit will not bring any ‘pacification’ to the relations between confessions in Ukraine but, on the contrary, it will only complicate them,’’ Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II said today, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Representatives of Ukraine’s largest Orthodox Church plan to boycott a meeting tomorrow between the pope and leaders of Ukrainian churches. Metropolitan Vladimir, the head of Ukraine’s Moscow-affiliated church, flatly ruled out any meeting with John Paul.

’’If we embrace and give each other a brotherly kiss at a time when problems continue to exist and the people are suffering, it would look like a betrayal of Orthodoxy,’’ he said in a documentary due to be broadcast today on Russia’s RTR television.

Protest organisers on Friday instructed their followers not to demonstrate during the pope’s visit.

’’Everybody understands that for those faithful to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, there is no need to have 30,000 Italian, Polish and Ukrainian policemen who in the name of the pope’s security will watch our citizens through rifle sights,’’ said a statement released by the Ukrainian Orthodox Brotherhood, which organised the earlier protests.

Instead, they said Orthodox believers could attend all-night vigils where a special prayer used in time of war - Against the Adversary - would be read.

This morning, dozens of believers chanted prayers and walked in a procession around the main cathedral in Kiev’s Monastery of the Caves, a site considered sacred to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and central to the Ukrainian nation’s identity.

A steady rain fell as they circled the church.

John Paul is visiting Ukraine at the invitation of President Leonid Kuchma, who apparently saw the trip as a way of advancing his nation’s quest for acceptance in the West.

The country of 50 million is fractured along religious lines.

There are about one million Roman Catholics and five million Eastern Rite Catholics, who follow Orthodox ritual but bear allegiance to the pope. Two small Orthodox churches are vying with the Moscow Patriarchate for influence among Orthodox believers.

In addition to the two Masses outside Kiev, the pope was scheduled to visit a monument that commemorates the Nazis’ killing of more than 33,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, and to beautify 28 Eastern rite Catholics, most of them considered martyrs under the Nazis or communists.

On Monday, he is to travel to the western Catholic stronghold of Lviv, where at least 1.5 million believers are expected to attend Mass.

AP