Sviatoslav Shevchuk is Major Archbishop of Kyiv–Galicia and Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church / Credit: Screenshot/EWTN News Nightly
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 7, 2024 / 13:00 pm (CNA).
In an exclusive interview with EWTN News in advance of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, major archbishop of Kyiv-Galicia and the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, pleaded for the president and U.S. lawmakers to renew needed aid to his war-torn country.
“I would like to convey to the president the voice of the simple people of Ukraine who are crying out to God and to the consciousness of the good people of the earth: Please don’t give up Ukraine,” Shevchuk said during a recent interview at the Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine of the Holy Family in Washington, D.C.
The Ukrainian patriarch is in the U.S. for a week of meetings with public officials and Church leaders to foster renewed support for Ukraine.
Though he underscored that he wanted to convey “first of all” a “message of gratitude” to the American people from Ukraine, Shevchuk voiced his worry that ordinary Ukrainian people are being forgotten as the prolonged U.S. political debate over continued support for Ukraine has delayed necessary action.
According to Shevchuk there are currently 14.6 million Ukrainians “in urgent humanitarian need.” Instead of thinking of the war in political terms, Shevchuk urged the American people to think of Ukraine in terms of its “simple, suffering people.”
In this context, the patriarch said there is no time for delay. “We cannot say, okay, I’ll eat on the next week,” he said, adding that the Ukrainian Catholic Church “is a main actor in this humanitarian action of assistance to the Ukrainian people, and I can testify that aid cannot be delayed.”
“Each day, probably 200 Ukrainians are killed and any delay of the capability to receive the help to protect those people is paid with their blood.”
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University of Notre Dame professor Kathleen Sprows Cummings. Credit: Ken Oliver-Méndez/CNA
Jan 10, 2026 / 10:12 am (CNA).
Assessing the impact of the Catholic Church’s first American pope was front and center at the 106th annual meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA), which met in Pope Leo XIV’s hometown of Chicago from Jan. 8-11.
During a panel on the subject, Catholic scholars noted some of the historic caricatures of what an American papacy would be like and compared that to the first eight months of Leo’s actual papacy.
American Catholic History Association panelists (from left to right) Brian Flanagan, Colleen Dulle, Miguel Diaz and Kathleen Sprows Cummings. Credit: Ken Oliver-Méndez/CNA
At the outset of the panel, University of Notre Dame history professor Kathleen Sprows Cummings referenced the 1894 Puck magazine cartoon titled “ The American Pope,” which depicts the first apostolic delegate to the United States, Cardinal Francesco Satolli, sitting atop a church labeled the “American headquarters” and casting a shadow of then Pope Leo XIII over the entire country.
Sprows Cummings noted the cartoon illustrates “fears about papal intervention in the United States” at a time when the country was receiving waves of Catholic immigrants from countries such as Ireland and Italy.
As Catholics became more settled in American society in the subsequent decades, she said some of those prejudices began to lessen and pointed to the 1918 election of Catholic Democrat Al Smith as New York’s governor. By this point, Catholics had become “much more confident about their place in American culture.”
During the same early 20th century period, the United States also began to rise as a superpower. Sprows Cummings noted that predominant concerns about an American pope shifted to Vatican concerns over the “Americanization of the Catholic Church.”
America magazine’s Vatican correspondent, Colleen Dulle, said some of those concerns were evidently mitigated in the person of then Cardinal Robert Prevost, whose service to the Church included many years as a missionary and bishop in Peru as well as in Rome as the head of a global religious order, the Augustinians.
Sprows Cummings said the College of Cardinals clearly saw in Cardinal Prevost the “pastoral presence, administrative savvy and global vision” that the Church needed at this time and that he was “not elected in some flex of American power.”
Miguel Diaz, the John Courtney Murray, S.J. Chair in Public Service at Loyola University Chicago, noted that some of Leo’s actions have actually amounted to the opposite of flexing American power, such as his focus on the dignity of migrants, which he contrasted to the policies of the Trump administration.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Miguel Diaz. Credit: Ken Oliver-Méndez/CNA
Diaz, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See under former President Barack Obama, said Leo is “a different symbol, from America first to America cares.”
He emphasized that having an American pope is significant amid the country’s political debates because “he can say things and he will be listened to.”
The panelists also discussed what Leo’s papacy may look like moving forward, with Dulle noting that only this year are there clear signs of him charting his own programmatic course, as the events and itinerary of the 2025 Jubilee were primarily developed for Pope Francis.
Up until now, she said, he has been mostly “continuing the Francis initiatives in a different style.”
She noted Pope Leo’s management of this week’s consistory — a meeting between the pope and the College of Cardinals — where the pontiff gave them four topics to choose from, which were all in line with Francis’s priorities: synodality, evangelization, reform of the curia, and the liturgy. The cardinals chose synodality and evangelization.
Dulle said Leo is seen as “a consensus builder” who aims to build consensus around the Church’s priorities. She noted Pope Leo’s announcement this week of a regular schedule of consistories, with the next one set for this June. This approach is emerging as a “hallmark of how he governs the Church” Dulle said.
Brian Flanagan, the John Cardinal Cody Chair of Catholic Theology at Loyola University Chicago, also emphasized Leo’s strong appeal to the cardinals and bishops in efforts to reach consensus, in keeping with the Pope’s role as a preserver of unity.
Flanagan said he sees Leo exercising the papacy as not so much “at the top of the pyramid, but as at the center of conversation.” He said this is likely influenced by Leo’s past as leader of a religious order — the Order of Saint Augustine — rather than a diocese because the orders are “global, diverse, and somewhat fractious.”
“You can’t govern a global religious community without getting people on board,” he said.
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