Turning the pages back...

August 6, 1968

In an effort to bridge the divide between the two Churches and make amends for what Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, primate of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, called the "tree of disunity that was planted centuries ago by our ancestors," Archbishop John Theodorovich, metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S.A., welcomed Cardinal Slipyj to the Memorial Church in South Bound Brook, N.J., on August 6, 1968.

As the two met in front of the church's iconostasis, Metropolitan John said to Cardinal Slipyj, "I greet you as a brother, a Christian and a Ukrainian." They took a tour of the church museum and the adjacent cemetery, and then sat down together in the chambers of the Consistory for a brief reception.

Cardinal Slipyj's visit to the Ukrainian Orthodox Center was part of a larger journey that brought him to Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, New York City and Stamford, Conn., on July 20-August 15. At every stop he was greeted by overwhelming crowds, including over 5,000 faithful awaiting his arrival in Philadelphia, his first destination.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey and former Vice-President Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate at the time, sent their regards to Cardinal Slipyj via telegrams which were read at a banquet in the cardinal's honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Mr. Nixon, after alluding to Cardinal Slipyj's "martyrdom in the prisons of the godless" - a reference to his 18 years as a Soviet prisoner - pointed to the primate's visit to America as a symbol of a "brighter future when those still deprived of their basic rights and freedoms will at last be able to form one happy family with the free world."

Cardinal Slipyj's 1968 visit marked the first time the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church had toured the United States since Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky's journey four decades earlier.

Source: "Metropolitan John Greets Cardinal in Bound Brook," The Ukrainian Weekly, August 10, 1968.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 5, 2001, No. 31, Vol. LXIX

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