Ukrainian primate sees 'humanitarian tragedy' in children growing up without parents
October 17, 2014
The leader of the Ukrainian Catholic Church has said that the growing number of children worldwide who grow up without their parents is becoming a “new humanitarian tragedy.”
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kiev told Vatican Radio that discussions at the Synod of Bishops had called attention to the fact that 70% of the world’s children are being raised without the presence of their mother and father. This phenomenon causes special challenges for the Church, he said—including the challenge of helping those children to learn how they might create stable families of their own.
In light of the breakdown of so many marriages, the Ukrainian prelate said, the Church must redouble her work with families. He observed that in the Eastern churches, that question is viewed in terms of pastoral aid rather than canonical procedures. The Church sets forth an ideal of married life, he said. Then the question is how pastors can help “the people of today’s culture, people who are getting more and more fragile, to be able, according to spiritual and human growth and maturity, to achieve such an ideal?”
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