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Vision of the special position of the UGCC

In 1907, Sheptytsky wrote in his pastoral letter "On work for the union of Oriental Churches," which stated, "connected to the West by faith and to the East by ritual, we, more than anyone else, can work on restoration of the Church unity."
In his pastoral letter “On the occasion of the 950th anniversary of the Christianization of Ukraine-Russ,” Sheptytsky noted: "Since our position between the East and the West during past few centuries forced our people to experience, digest and overcome all the stages of the Church’s global Separation and Reunion, let our work in this direction aim at atonement among ourselves and thereby bring divided churches to reconciliation.

The Metropolitan also reflected on the peculiarities of Eastern and Western religious traditions: “Byzantine culture, along with the whole culture of Slavic East, is much more imbued with Christian ideas and has much clearer traces of liturgical education of the people if compared to Western civilization. In the West, undoubtedly, great Christian ideas became foundational for all cultures. They created intellectual, artistic and scientific life, which evolved extremely rapidly and apparently lost traces of the Christian idea, the one they derived from

"I dare to say that perhaps individualism is too strong in the West, while in the East we suffer from collectivism. "