In November 1994 together with the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies of St. Paul University in Ottawa the ICH organized a traveling conference with sessions in Kyiv and Lviv commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Metropolitan Sheptytsky.
In March 1996, the ICH conducted an international symposium on the liquidation of the different Greek Catholic Churches in Eastern Europe, held on the occasion of the 50-th anniversary of the notorious "Lviv Synod of 1946" through which the UGCC was officially repressed.
The symposia were devoted to issues that besides having academic significance were hotly debated in Ukraine and in the international context. Besides effectively addressing scholarly, student, and general audiences and providing first-rate materials for publication these conferences served to create an extensive international network of academic collaboration and exchange of ideas. In recent years, however, the ICH has not been able to secure funding for conferences and has, therefore, concentrated on other aspects of its mission.
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In the future it will be necessary to resume conference programming to provide forums for intellectual communication, discussion, and networking, especially for young scholars. The ICH hopes to organize for Eastern Christian scholars a symposium on the contemporary methods of church history. Such a conference could be the first step in initiating an Orthodox-Catholic project to write inter-confessional histories of Ukrainian ecclesial developments. Given the social tensions and everyday problems exacerbated by the lack of inter-confessional consensus on key historical moments the imperative to pursue such collaborative efforts is manifest.
