VERY REV. DR. PETER GALADZA

Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Priest and Full Professor, Faculty of Theology (Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies) and Kule Family Professor of Liturgy at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Ontario

Date and Place of Birth: 1955 in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, USA

Date of Interview: July 26 2016

Place of Interview: Ottawa, Ontario

Interviewer: Kassandra Luciuk

Length of Interview: 02:16:16 (raw)

(Excerpt):

This is a flashpoint in terms of discussions within our community because increasingly what we have is a situation where the secularizing pull causes a lot of people who, 30 years ago, could not have imagined their Ukrainian-ness without the church – a lot of those people just don’t feel the need to be in church anymore. For me, as a Ukrainian Catholic, that’s always very, very painful. However, the positive side of that is that, on a Sunday morning when I look out at the people, I know that the people are there because they want to worship the Lord, first and foremost. It’s not just a cultural thing. So we’re in this strange transitional period and as a priest I have to deal with this all the time. And as someone who is involved with kind of conceptualizing the course for the Ukrainian Catholic Church in western countries, we’re dealing constantly with this question: What do you do when you’re on the cusp of the old Christendom? In other words: cultural Christianity, on the one hand, and this new shift to voluntary association. Because no one is going to frown, no one at the KYK [Ukrainian Canadian Congress] meeting is going to say: “I didn’t see you in church on Christmas.” No one cares anymore. Whereas 20 or 30 years ago [they would have said: “Who is this guy?”]. So, as I say, the positive of that is that you have people going for the right reasons. The negative that can happen is that sometimes people who are fundamentally cultural Christians block the road for people who have discovered our church and want the kind of church that Sheptytsky proclaimed – a church which is one holy Catholic and apostolic, and committed to transforming lives by the power of the Holy Spirit, you know, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

CROSS REFERENCES:

1. •Peter Galadza faculty profile at Metropolitan Andrey Sheptiytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, St. Paul’s University, Ottawa, Canada
   

1. •Wikipedia contributors, "Peter Galadza," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia