On Tuesday, November 15, 2022 Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, an Irish Catholic, announced a $21.4 million award in federal grants to organizations statewide for aid to Ukrainian refugees, including $1,775,841 to Catholic Charities on Long Island. While laudable on her part and in keeping with the Church’s mission to aid victims displaced by war, NY’s catholic governor and the trip to Ukraine by NY Bishop Barres and his entourage, ignore the reason for Russia’s war of liberation. Starting with Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandara, the malign entanglements and link between the Catholic Church and Ukraine’s Nazi past is at the root of this myopic, one-eyed view towards victims of war.
The corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and the complicity of the US and the west as leading protagonists in this war, are no strangers to this author. Who is Bishop Barres trying to please? Who is his audience, and why would he go to L’Viv, a hotbed of hate towards Russia, hub for foreign mercenaries signing up to fight for Ukraine and a city who immortalized genocidal Nazi war criminal Stepan Bandera? As it turns out, Bishop Barres represented the USCC, the United States Catholic Conference of bishops (see caption below). That he represented the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops tells you all you need to know about the USCC, the church, who he represented and his audience.
Since before the 2014 US-Sponsored coup in Ukraine that removed Viktor Yanukovych, the democratically-elected leader of that country, ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine (the Donbass) were under constant bombardment by their own government, killing thousands. With the daily bombardment that continues to this day, the number is approaching 20,000. In discarding the Minsk accords, as it turns out now in a grand deception, drafted and ratified by the West, Russia and Ukraine, the US and it’s western allies have brought down Ivan’s terrible fury on to the heads of Kiev’s gargoyles – in a war that Russia has already won.
To be clear, this isn’t ‘Putin’s War’. The Russian President acted under the authority of the state Duma, members of which for 8 years had been pleading he do something to stop the carnage in the Donbass. He prevaricated and stalled, hoping that diplomacy and cooler heads would prevail, but alas, that never happened. Feigning ignorance of their culpability in underwriting the 2014 Maidan Coup and, previously, lying to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the west and NATO will not progress “one inch to the east” when that’s all they’ve done for 30 years, the church and western leaders now wax empathetic at what they’ve wrought: the displacement of tens of thousands?
Make no mistake, the presence of this NY bishop in L’Viv, presiding at a mass of Christian burial for 2 Ukrainian solders, sends a clear message of support, especially when he represents the United States Catholic Conference of bishops. What is that message? The church stands with the likes of Stepan Bandera, the Azov Battalion, the Right Sector and their fellow Nazis in L’Viv:
Lviv was the first city in Ukraine to be occupied by the Germans in June 1941, and a pogrom in which 2,000 people were massacred, followed shortly thereafter.
Joshua Tartakovsky, 6 January, 2015
The full account by Joshua Tartakovsky on the occasion of his visit to the city in December 2014 can be found here: Are There Nazis in Ukraine? A Visit to Lviv.
Where is the outrage, sympathy and public-money payout for the crimes committed by the Ukrainian Army and Security Services against the civilians of the Donbass? I’m all for helping-out victims of war, but let’s be even-handed, especially when you’re largely responsible for the situation these victims are suffering!
And now it emerges during congressional testimony, that the FBI, in collusion with a compromised Ukrainian Intelligence Agency, was taking orders to censor Americans!