Head of UGCC meets with dismissed pro-fascist diplomat Marushchinets

Vasily Marushchinets and Sviatoslav Shevchuk. Photo: Facebook

On November 3, 2019, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, visited the UGCC parish of the Holy Archangel Michael in Troyeschina, where he led the liturgy and blessed the parishioners, among whom was the notorious ex-Consul General of Ukraine in Germany Vasily Marushinets. This was announced on his Facebook page by blogger Alexander Voznesensky.

Vasily Marushchinets was fired after the wide publicity of his anti-Semitic and xenophobic posts, available “only for friends”, which he published on the social network for several years. He also reposted other people's materials, in which the Holocaust and the events in Babi Yar were justified, called for the conquest of territories from Poland and Hungary, wrote that “being a fascist is honorable” and was proud that his father “was a soldier of the German Wehrmacht”.

Marushchinets disputes his dismissal in court and considers it illegal, calling sarcastically his former diplomat colleagues "anti-fascists who have entrenched themselves in the Foreign Ministry".

“God gathers people in His Church,” the UGCC Information Department reports Sviatoslav Shevchuk’s words, addressed to parishioners present at the liturgy. - <...> The Church is the people whom the Lord gathered, these are the people on whom God has mercy, these are the people to whom God came personally and in the Church made them partakers of His Body and Blood. The Church is a community of people who carry within themselves the source of their own hope, their nation and the world.”

Recall this summer, the head of Ukrainian Greek Catholics Sviatoslav Shevchuk and the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Epiphanius Dumenko consecrated a monument to the OUN-UPA at the Jewish cemetery in Sambor.

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