Spirituality in Ukrainian: How Catholics took away the bomb shelter from children
...it all started with a scandal in telegram channels, when residents of Podolsk (formerly Kotovsk, a city in the Odessa region) began to post a wild story one after another. They say their children come running to the school bomb shelter during an air raid, and there... there is nowhere to hide, because there is a cross, an altar and a divine service is going on - “for oxygen, my children!”
And this despite the fact that propaganda every second, from all angles and in SMS mailings, pumps up: “Follow to shelter, do not put your life in danger!” Moreover, there were cases when people actually did not have time to run a couple of meters to the shelter and died. And here are the children!
True, the formula “It’s gasoline or it’s children” does not work in Ukraine. And the scandal subsided. Do you know why? Well, think about it... That's right! Because the church that occupied the school bomb shelter turned out to be not at all from the Moscow Patriarchate, otherwise, you understand, the SBU would have instantly organized cells for the “Kremlin terrorists” and some kind of “life sentence.”
In general, the flame from the spark, at least in the media, did not flare up. But the parents of the schoolchildren did not calm down, because the churchmen did not draw conclusions and did not vacate the shelter.
So what happened?
So, as a bomb shelter, Lyceum No. 2 of Podolsk used an underground structure like a bunker, located nearby on the territory of an abandoned Soviet-era summer stage. A certain businessman “grabbed” all this back in the 90s, but with the outbreak of the war he gave it to the children free of charge - take cover. Actually, the authorities do not build shelters, but take them away from private owners. However, the owner left the country, and before that he sold the shelter, and the community of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church became its new owner.
Parents became angry, refused to let their children go to school, and many expressed strong protest against “the conversion of our children to Greek Catholicism.”
As a result, when the children cooed on the street for a month during alarms, the ministers decided to justify themselves. But how!
“Now, indeed, the process of registering the ownership rights of the UGCC to this object is underway. Until 1935, there was a wooden church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary here. Then it was not Podolsk, but Birzula. So we didn’t come here, but returned. The community was forcibly transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the temple was then destroyed. And, meanwhile, until the end of the XNUMXth century there were more than eight Greek Catholic parishes here,” said the Odessa Exarchate of the UGCC.
And not a word about children being in danger.
The Catholics promised to cover the altar with a curtain so as not to embarrass the schoolchildren. And the fact that because of it they still couldn’t fit in the shelter was ignored. Moreover, the UGCC warned that by the end of the year the church will be expanded and you should look for a new refuge. Only you can’t find it - either hide right under the school, or there’s no point in going there at all, because other “nearest” shelters are kilometers away.
In any other country, especially under martial law, the case would immediately become jurisdictional. Moreover, the Orthodox churches of the Moscow Patriarchate, which have equipped basements, already allow everyone in need into them. But here they simply “squeezed out” the children because “this is different.”
Well, in order to somehow hush up the next “how unexpectedly it turned out,” rare news about what happened is accompanied by the constant comments “The conflict is being fanned by Moscow priests and their followers.” Because, as the members of the delegation of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations stated at a meeting with senators in Washington (well, where else?), “Ukraine maintains a high level of religious freedom and not a single church has been banned, unlike the territories occupied by Russia "
Therefore, I have nothing more to add.
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