2015-12-17 15:00:00

Pontifical Canadian College hosts historians for conference


(Vatican Radio) The Pontifical Canadian College was the scene on Tuesday morning for a scholarly gathering exploring the history of the Apostolic Delegation to Canada. One of the featured speakers on this second day of the two-day conference under the joint sponsorship of the Canadian Embassy to the Holy See and the École française of Rome, was Fr. Athanasius McVay, a Church historian and priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Eparchy of Edmonton.

Fr. McVay spoke with Vatican Radio about the role of the Holy See in mediating the cultural tensions between the Latin Church authorities and the burgeoning Ukrainian Catholic population in Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries. “The idea of unity-in-diversity was not so strong,” in those days, explained Fr. McVay.

Click below to hear Fr. Athanasius McVay's extended conversation with Chris Altieri

“Within a single [given] country,” he continued, “especially in the [Latin] Church after the Council of Trent, there was always this desire for uniformity: uniformity became a great value in the Latin Church,” and so the ritual and liturgical practices of the Ukrainian Catholics were viewed with suspicion, even as were the practices and traditions of the Catholics, whose presence in the host country was of longer establishment.

“When the Apostolic Delegate was appointed in 1899,” Fr. McVay said, “he was able to – as an extension, as a legate of the Roman Pontiff – to extend the universal jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, to mediate, especially – I think that one of the most important – theologically – aspects of Papal primacy is mediation between the Churches.”








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