1996: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: Church affairs: Sobors and Synods (12/29/96)

1996: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Church affairs: Sobors and Synods

In religious matters, 1996 was a year of consecrations of new bishops, more inter- and intra-confessional strife in Ukraine, and the 400th anniversary of the Union of Brest, which included the first Sobor of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and a Synod of Bishops.

The year began with the consecration of the Rev. Cornelius John Pasichny as the Ukrainian Catholic eparch of Saskatoon on January 17. The 68-year-old Basilian priest was elevated at St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in Winnipeg, where he had served as pastor for the past decade and had been baptized as a child. His consecrators included Bishop Severian Yakymyshyn, who was elevated to the episcopacy in March 1995, Canadian Archbishop-Metropolitan Michael Bzdel and Bishop Basil Filevich, his predecessor.

Then on April 17, the Ukrainian Catholic Church elevated the Rev. Stephen Soroka to assist one of its ailing leaders, Canadian Archbishop-Metropolitan Bzdel, who had just undergone quintuple bypass heart surgery. The Rev. Soroka, 44, who had been the archeparchy's chancellor, now carried the title auxiliary bishop. The youngest Canadian bishop was consecrated on June 13 at Ss. Vladimir and Olga Cathedral in Winnipeg.

On May 3, Canada's first Ukrainian Catholic archbishop-metropolitan, Maxim Hermaniuk, who had retired in 1992 and was succeeded by Metropolitan Bzdel, passed away. He was 84. The Redemptorist monk was born in Nove Selo in western Ukraine in 1911, and was ordained a priest in 1938. Fluent in several languages, including ancient Babylonian, he received his licentiate from the University of Louvain in Belgium in 1943 in Oriental languages and history. He was elevated to auxiliary bishop of the Exarchate of Winnipeg in 1951. He was appointed Canada's first Ukrainian Catholic metropolitan on November 3, 1956, and was enthroned on February 12, 1957, in Ss. Vladimir and Olga Cathedral in Winnipeg. More than 1,000 people attended his funeral at the same cathedral on May 2, 1996.

The most prominent of several new appointments to head Ukrainian Greek-Catholic eparchies around the world was that of Bishop Lubomyr Husar to the newly established Kyiv-Vyshhorod Exarchate in Ukraine on April 2. Bishop Husar had been consecrated by the Lviv archbishop major and head of the Church, Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, 19 years earlier at the Studite Monastery in Castelgandolfo, near Rome.

The 63-year-old Studite monk, along with Bishop Ivan Choma, who was named Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky's special envoy to Rome the same day, were the last Ukrainian Greek-Catholic bishops to come out of the underground when they were consecrated by Patriarch Josyf.

Bishop Husar was installed as the Kyiv-Vyshhorod exarch on June 2 at the chapel-rotunda known as Askold's Mound (Askoldova Mohyla). The event was attended by the papal nuncio, Cardinal Antonio Franco, Patriarch Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate and Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Bishops Pavlo Vasylyk, Yulian Voronovsky, Vasyl Medvit, Ivan Margitych, Mykhailo Sabryha and Mykhail Koltun.

In a year of shake-ups and restructuring for the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Bishop Husar, still not settled into his chair as the leader of the Kyiv-Vyshhorod Exarchate, was moved again on October 14. The bed-ridden leader of the Church, Cardinal Lubachivsky, assigned him extraordinary powers as his auxiliary bishop, which was approved by both the Synod of Bishops, which had just been completed, and the Vatican.

The role that Bishop Husar was now to assume was not clear at the time of his appointment. However, Archbishop-Metropolitan of the United States Stephen Sulyk told The Weekly at the time that Bishop Husar had been granted almost all the powers of the Church. "He has the power to call synods, to preside over them and to approve their decisions."

According to Bishop Husar, his is a humble role. He said on October 22 at a press conference in Kyiv that he was appointed merely to carry out the responsibilities and the duties of Cardinal Lubachivsky, and that upon the archbishop major's death, his position is liquidated, and carries no right to succession.

"When His Beatitude dies, and with God's blessing that will not happen soon, all my authority dies with him," said Bishop Husar.

The new administrative leader of the Church said he was returning to Lviv to be close to the ailing Cardinal Lubachivsky. A new exarch for Kyiv-Vyshhorod would soon be appointed, he stated.

That happened less than a month later, on November 13. Bishop Husar, with Cardinal Lubachivsky's approval, appointed Bishop Koltun, 47, the second exarch of Kyiv-Vyshhorod. Bishop Koltun, who has had a dramatic rise in the Church, was installed a bishop in September 1993 at St. George Cathedral in Lviv, the seat of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. He was the first bishop consecrated in Ukraine since the Church had come out of the underground.

The decision to give Bishop Husar his new responsibility was made at the Synod of Bishops held in October in Lviv in conjunction with the historic first Sobor of the Church.

It also coincided with celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the Union of Brest, proclaimed on October 16, 1596, which reunited a portion of Ukrainian Orthodoxy with Rome after the Muslim conquests of Constantinople, divisions within the Ukrainian Church and the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Sobor, held on October 6-10 and attended by representatives of the Church's laity, clergy and hierarchy, was deemed an unqualified success by Bishop Husar. "I was also impressed with the fact that our whole Church was at the Sobor - bishops, priests, the laity - all of whom took active part in the discussions ... the collaborations among the various elements of our people is of itself proof of the vitality of our Church," said the bishop.

What showed the extent of the revival of the Church in Ukraine was the turnout for a divine liturgy that was celebrated on Freedom Square on October 13. Some 30,000 people attended the service under a dazzling blue sky. They stood on park benches and on the large flower pots that dot the square for almost three hours, as Canada's Archbishop Bzdel celebrated the liturgy, with Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, representative for Pope John Paul II, and Papal Nuncio to Ukraine Antonio Franco in attendance, as well as all the bishops of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and a large number of the clergy.

While murmurs already abounded at that time that Bishop Husar would become assistant to the leader of the Church, other ones regarding the recognition of a patriarchate by Rome and a visit by the pope also were heard.

Cardinal Silvestrini quickly put to rest any notion of a visit to Ukraine by the pope in 1997 when he told The Weekly in a quick interview in Lviv that too many matters still had to be worked out with the Ukrainian government. He added, "We can look at the visit with hope, but at the moment nothing is decided."

As for hope by the faithful of the Ukrainian Catholic Church that a patriarchate would soon be recognized by the Vatican, that still hangs in limbo. As the head of the Ukrainian World Patriarchal Federation, Wasyl Kolodchin, put it, the failure of the Vatican to act on recognition of a patriarchate for Ukraine is "strictly political" in nature. "The only hindrance to recognizing a patriarchate is the Moscow Patriarchate (of the Orthodox Church)."

As unsettled as the situation was with the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, more so were issues surrounding the Orthodox Churches of Ukraine (there are currently three).

First the Moscow Patriarchate held an anti-Sobor in Lviv during the time of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church's conference. Leaders of the Church, including Moscow Patriarch Aleksey II, Kyiv Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan and Metropolitan of the United States and Canada Feodosiy sent a letter greeting that conference, held at the Russian Pushkin Society building. The Orthodox sobor discussed how to prevent a visit by Pope John Paul II, which had been rumored for 1997, and that "Uniates" had persecuted Orthodox.

Other problems within Orthodoxy had arisen earlier. On March 5 at a news conference in Kyiv, Patriarch Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate stated that the recent rift between Constantinople and Moscow, which considers itself the Third Rome in terms of mainstream Christianity, over Constantinople's recognition of the Estonian Patriarchate could lead to the end of the Russian "spiritual empire."

The leader of the Kyiv Patriarchate had been negotiating with Constantinople for reunion and recognition by the universal seat of Orthodoxy on Ukraine's position in that Church.

Then at the Synod of Bishops held on October 18-19, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church announced that its Patriarch Dymytrii had resigned. Metropolitan Vasylii of Ternopil and Lviv was assigned in his place. The newspaper Den wrote that the five hierarchs of the Church had sought for a long time to remove Patriarch Dymytrii for usurping power. His right-hand man, Bishop Ihor Isichenko of Kharkiv, was removed by the Synod after the announcement. (The Weekly will cover alleged financial improprieties on both sides in the first issues of 1997.)

One issue that might have finally been resolved, and was a matter between Church and state, was the status of the place where Patriarch Volodymyr of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate, is interred. On July 14 more than 1,000 people gathered in front of St. Sophia Cathedral to pay tribute to the leader of the Church on the first anniversary of his death. His gravesite, which had been dug from the asphalt and rock before the belltower of St. Sophia a year earlier amidst brutal police force, was now besplendored with flowers and a marble sarcophagus, courtesy of the city of Kyiv.

Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko had pledged on June 18 that a memorial outside the walls of the historic cathedral would be built for the late patriarch at a cost of $71,000.

At the time of his burial in 1995, militia and Ministry of Internal Affairs police had bloodied dozens because the faithful resisted a decision by the government that the patriarch could not be buried in St. Sophia Cathedral.

Other notable events in Church affairs included the following:

Metropolitans, archbishops and bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople), representing eparchies in Canada, the U.S., South America, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and faithful communities in western Europe gathered on June 25-26 for an in-depth discussion of the challenges before the Church.
The Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Stamford celebrated 25 years since Bishop Basil Losten was installed as its eparch on May 22.
Poland's new Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Archbishop Jan Martyniak announced on August 17 that the Peremyshl seat of the Church had been upgraded by the Vatican to a metropolitan archdiocese.

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