The annual collection for the Catholic Church in Central and Eastern Europe will take place on Ash Wednesday, March 5. Last year, $87,940 was collected in the Diocese of Camden.
This year’s collection for the Church in nations once under Soviet control is “ever more urgent,” especially as Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine enters its fourth year, and as the Church continues to rebuild in nations scarred by communism, said Bishop Gerald L. Vincke, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee on Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe.
Bishop Vincke said funds raised by the collection support “the kind of ministry-against-all-odds that we read about in the Book of Acts.”
Launched under Saint John Paul II in 1991 as communist regimes collapsed throughout Europe, the appeal aids Catholics in 28 European countries in various stages of recovering from longtime totalitarian oppression: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia (Czech Republic), Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
Communist regimes routinely decimated faith communities and their structures by exiling, imprisoning, torturing and killing believers, while seizing houses of worship and destroying religious literature and objects. In Soviet Ukraine, authorities formally liquidated the visible structures of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, with believers forced underground until 1989, some two years before the nation gained its independence from the former Soviet Union.
~ Compiled from staff and OSV reports
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”
