ROME – Amid myriad reactions unleashed by Fiducia Supplicans, a new Vatican document advising on non-liturgical blessings of same-sex couples, Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church has become the first eastern communion to declare explicitly that the document does not apply outside the Latin Church.
“On the basis of canon. 1492 of the CCCC this Declaration concerns purely the Latin Church and has no legal force for the faithful of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church,” said Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Church, in a Dec. 22 statement.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, numbering some six million faithful worldwide, is the largest of the 23 eastern Churches in communion with Rome. Shevchuk said his statement came in response to appeals from bishops, clergy, monastics, church movements, and individual laity of the church.
While other bishops and groups of bishops, including in African nations such as Malawi and Zambia, have expressed opposition to the content of Fiducia Supplicans or hesitance to apply it, the Greek Catholic Church becomes the first ecclesiastical jurisdiction to claim that as a legal matter, the document does not apply to them.
