Aid to the Church in Need grants Catholics in Ukraine emergency aid

ACN News, Tuesday, 25th March 2014 – UKRAINE
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Aid to the Church in Need grants Catholics in Ukraine emergency aid

By Reinhard Backes

The international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need is granting the Archdiocese of Kyiv and the Crimean Diocese of Odessa-Simferopol emergency aid totalling $90,000. Two thirds of this sum is needed among other things for care of the sick, psychological assistance and medications. One third will be made available to military chaplains for petrol and other transport costs, especially for transfers between the mainland and the Crimean peninsula. “In view of the persisting critical situation in Ukraine, the Archdiocese of Kyiv and the Diocese of Odessa-Simferopol have asked us for support,” Magda Kaczmarek, head of the relevant national section, confirmed. Auxiliary Bishop Jacek Pyl of Odessa-Simferopol had earlier made a dramatic appeal to all parties to the conflict in Crimea to renounce violence.


(Auxiliary Bishop Jacek Pyl of Odessa-Simferopol © Aid to the Church in Need)

Bishop Pyl’s actual words were: “I am calling on all the people both faithful and the others that in the name of the solidarity with the heritage of our Fathers, who cared for the development of our Autonomous Republic of Crimea, to stay away from extremisms and in this hard time do not let the brotherhood among Crimean people to be broken. In ARoC we have Ukrainians, Russians, Crimean Tartars, Armenians, Poles, Germans, Czechs and many others living peacefully together. For many centuries we had the Orthodox, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Karaims, people of other denominations together with atheists living in Crimea. We cannot let our ethnical background nor our religion to divide us now. We are children of the same God; the only God, who is our common Father.”

Editor’s Notes

Directly under the Holy See, Aid to the Church in Need supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed or in pastoral need. ACN is a Catholic charity – helping to bring Christ to the world through prayer, information and action.
The charity undertakes thousands of projects every year including providing transport for clergy and lay Church workers, construction of church buildings, funding for priests and nuns and help to train seminarians. Since the initiative’s launch in 1979, Aid to the Church in Need’s Child’s Bible – God Speaks to his Children has been translated into 172 languages and 50 million copies have been distributed all over the world.
While ACN gives full permission for the media to freely make use of the charity’s press releases, please acknowledge ACN as the source of stories when using the material.

For more information or to make a donation to help the work of Aid to the Church in Need, please contact the Australian office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 7246 Baulkham Hills BC NSW 2153.

On Line donations can be made at http://www.aidtochurch.org