The Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church is the first of the Eastern Catholic Churches to publish its own catechism, Christ our Pascha. The catechism is not dependent upon the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), like all of the other catechisms published by various national bishops conferences throughout the Catholic World. Its structure is entirely different and it is a thoroughly Eastern text. This is a concrete manifestation of the fact that the Second Vatican Council recognized that the Eastern Catholic Churches have their own theological, liturgical, spiritual and canonical traditions that are legitimately Catholic, but non-Roman.

Christ Our Pascha was published in Ukrainian in 2011 and promulgated by Patriarch Sviatoslav. Since then, a second, revised edition has appeared. The English translation was done under the supervision of a committee of bishops that included Bishops Peter Stasiuk, David Motiuk, Paul Chomnycky, and Hlib Lonchyna. Several translators were engaged who were familiar with both the Ukrainian and English languages and the theological terminology of the Eastern Churches.

After the drafts of the three sections of the catechism were completed, the Sheptytsky Institute was asked to do a thorough review. Fathers Andriy Chirovsky, Peter Galadza, and Andrew Onuferko worked for many months on the text together with Holy Spirit Seminary Rector, Fr. Michael Winn, who is the English Edition’s general editor. Fr. Michael is also a sessional professor at the Institute. Fr. Chirovsky reviewed the doctrinal section. The section on liturgy was reviewed by Fr. Galadza, and the ascetico-moral section was worked on by Fr. Onuferko.

It is expected that this long-awaited catechetical resource (well over 300 pages in its original Ukrainian edition) will be available within several months in English. Painstaking efforts were made to verify scriptural, patristic, liturgical and hagiographical references, and to render the text in an English edition that would be simultaneously very accurate and very user-friendly. This required significant work on rendering into English certain notions that are expressed in Ukrainian in language that cannot simply be transposed from that tongue, but need to be made truly comprehensible to the English-speaking reader. There will, no doubt, be further editions with continuing attention to accurate transmission of seminal notions, but the first English edition will soon be in the hands of the faithful and will be able to be utilized in various eparchial and parish-level catechetical programs.