Patriarch Title Caught in Catholic-Orthodox Rift

VATICAN CITY, Feb. 22 (AP) -- He got his ring but not his title.

Like the 43 other new cardinals, Lubomyr Husar knelt Thursday before Pope John Paul II and received his golden ring as a prince of the church.

But the leader of Ukrainian Greek Catholics, who number some 5 million in Ukraine and another 1 million abroad, didn't get what he and his predecessors have sought for years -- the title of patriarch.

What may seem to some as a minor squabble over church etiquette is a major issue between the Vatican and the Eastern rite Catholics in Ukraine:

Even as they emerge from decades of persecution under the Soviets, Ukrainian Greek Catholics have become a possible obstacle in the pope's drive to improve relations with Orthodox Christians, and to cap that with a visit to Moscow.

With the pope headed to Ukraine in June, Husar insists the trip not be seen as a stepping stone to Moscow but only as a visit to John Paul's Ukrainian flock.

"It should not be a dress rehearsal for Moscow," said the gray-bearded churchman, a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen.

The late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin forced the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church to join the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox church in 1946. Priests and the unwilling were jailed, deported or shot and its churches given to the Orthodox.

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