Perspectief 2015-28

2015-28 The Church and Reconciliation: 17 Reag eer brothers have invited children who suffered from the war in the East (either from migrant families or locals) to spend a month in the summer in Taize in the house of Genevieve Shutz, the sister of brother Roger, who used to take care the WWII orphans there. Those children will come to Taize in June and/or September accompanied by two volunteers from Ukraine. Most probably, those will be children of the Evangelical migrants from the East, who now live in the Makariv region and whom father Philaret and the parishioners visit. c) For several years already the parish is friends with the Comunione e Liberazione movement in Italy and in Russia. One of our greatest initiatives together was an ecumenical trip to the Holy Land in late December 2014 – early January 2015, and a seminar on the Orthodox metropolitan Anthony Bloom and the founder of the CL Don Luigi Guissani in Italy in early March 2015. The latter ended with the meeting of Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians with the Pope in Rome on March 7. Inspired by our friendship, the Italian organization “Familia per l’Acoglienza” invites children from the families of the wounded soldiers from the Makariv region to spend summer and winter holidays with the CL families in Italy every year, and we are now planning to start this project in the summer. To become a possible ground for reconciliation, a parish should be open to the civil society, as well as to academic initiatives directed towards reconciliation. As I mentioned at the beginning, our parish actively cooperates with University public, and the greatest embodiment of this friendship and cooperation is the Kyiv Summer Theological University, which is organized at the parish every year since 2002. In this context I should specifically mention the topic of the KSTU in July of 2015: Truth. Memory. Reconciliation . Designed to remind of and develop the idea of the “Truth and Reconciliation” commission in South Africa and emphasize the role of the memory that was perhaps missing there, KSTU will gather about 80 Ukrainians, the French, Italians, Germans, Americans, Russians and Belarusians, the Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants, priests and laity, professors and students, to openly discuss possible Christian answers to the problematic questions of the Ukrainian and global crisis. Thus, for the KSTU period the parish will become a platform for dialogue and a room for prophetic voices that would not be heard elsewhere in official church institutions. It is designed to become a laboratory for the Ukrainian “Truth, Memory