Remarks on the history of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in Ukraine and North America (07/19/98)

Remarks on the history of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in Ukraine and North America

by Frank Sysyn

The current debate about the decision of the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches of the United States and of Canada to submit to the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople (the U.S. in 1995, Canada in 1990), and the implications of these decisions for relations with the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches of Ukraine, has attracted the interest of wider circles of the laity and the Ukrainian community in Church affairs. As all polemics, the current one contains much information, but is selective in its presentation and unlikely to provide a balanced picture for the unengaged. While some of information about the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches is readily available in reference texts such as Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, not to speak of numerous monographs and articles, it would seem useful to outline some of the major questions involved in the current debate for readers of The Ukrainian Weekly and to direct those who are interested to further readings.

Orthodoxy in Ukraine

In 1686 the Kyiv Metropolitanate, which encompassed Ukraine and Belarus, was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Patriarchate of Moscow. This transfer reflected the growing Russian political influence in Ukraine after the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 between Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Russian authorities and removed the Kyiv Metropolitanate from the position of limited administrative subordination to the Mother Church of Constantinople to a position directly under the Russian Church.

The Russian state soon dismantled the Kyiv Metropolitanate as a distinct Church and integrated it into the Russian Orthodox Church. By the 19th century the Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church propagated a world view that saw Ukrainians as a mere regional group of Russians with no significant Church and cultural traditions of their own. This viewpoint never fully prevailed, in part because some Ukrainians lived outside the Russian Empire and because the existence of Uniates, or Orthodox Ukrainians united with Rome, created a group that could not fit in this model.

The political liberation of many Orthodox peoples (Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians) in the 19th century resulted in the establishment of new autocephalous or independent Orthodox Churches and the erection or re-establishment of patriarchates. These trends also affected Ukrainians, but in the Russian Empire the state and Church persecuted the Ukrainian national movement, even forbidding publication of the Bible in Ukrainian. The church services were in Old Slavonic, and therefore were largely incomprehensible to both Ukrainians and Russians; however, the Russian Orthodox Church used Russian exclusively in preaching and writings.

By the early 20th century many of the Orthodox bishops and higher clergy in Ukraine were becoming more and more Russian nationalist in their orientation, but a movement of lower clergy and laity emerged that strove to use Ukrainian in the Church and to restore the traditions of the Kyiv Metropolitanate.

The history of Orthodoxy in 20th century Ukraine has reflected the striving to establish a Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the opposition to this movement by groups that see Ukraine and its Orthodoxy as properly Russian. Political factors have largely determined this struggle, above all the failure to establish an independent Ukrainian state in 1917-1920.

In Church affairs, the crucial moment arrived in 1921, when, despairing at the continued antagonism of the Russian and Russified bishops to the Ukrainian Church movement, a group of priests and laity decided to establish a Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC), reviving an ancient Alexandrian rite that did not require having bishops consecrated by other Orthodox bishops. However, many Orthodox in Ukraine and abroad rejected this radical step (called by its enemies the "self-consecration") and considered the Church and its hierarchs to be illegitimate.

The Soviet destruction of the UAOC in the late 1920s and early 1930s after only a few years of the Church's existence gave the Church the aura of heroic martyrdom to many Ukrainian patriots, while its principles of autocephaly, Ukrainianization and conciliar government influenced subsequent Ukrainian Orthodox movements. When Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Churches were re-established in 1942 (in the areas of western Ukraine that passed from Soviet to German control) and again in 1989 in Ukraine, they reaffirmed the traditional Orthodox practice of consecration of bishops, thereby eliminating the argument that the Church hierarchs were not legitimate However, most of the Orthodox world still considered the Church to be illegitimate.

While the Soviet government opposed all religious groups, after World War II, they did permit the Russian Orthodox Church to function in Ukraine, forcing Ukrainian Orthodox and Uniate (Ukrainian Greek-Catholic) believers to belong to that Church. Therefore, the national movement in Ukraine in the late 1980s paid considerable attention to Church affairs. For the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, this meant support of the emergence of the Church from the underground and the restitution of its properties. For the Orthodox Church, issues were more complex, in particular because the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the Ukrainian national movement and the formation of a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, even more vehemently an autocephalous one.

In recent years, readers of The Ukrainian Weekly have been informed of the re-establishment of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine in 1989; the renaming of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Moscow Patriarchate and granting of autonomy in 1990; the failed attempt by Metropolitan Filaret to obtain autocephaly in 1991, and the creation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate in 1992 by a union of Filaret's supporters and most of the UAOC. These complex actions have now resulted in three Ukrainian Orthodox Churches in Ukraine, with the largest under the Moscow Patriarchate recognized by the Orthodox world. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate and the UAOC are headed by patriarchs but not recognized by other Orthodox Churches despite frequent overtures to the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Ukrainian Orthodoxy in North America

The Ukrainian Orthodox Churches in Canada and the United States were founded primarily by Ukrainian emigrants and their children from Galicia who were discontent with the situation of the Greek-Catholic Church (the name then used for the historical Uniates and present-day Ukrainian Catholics). The hostile reception that many Roman Catholic clergy gave the Greek-Catholics, the demand that church properties be controlled by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the attempts to have Polish and other Roman Catholic clergy serve the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics, as well as the Vatican order permitting only unmarried clergy to serve or be ordained greatly disturbed the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics who began arriving in the 1870s in the U.S. and the 1890s in Canada. After the arrival of Greek Catholic bishops (1907 in the U.S. and 1912 in Canada) tensions did not abate, in part because of the desire of newly arrived bishops to take full control of parish life and to have a decisive voice in community life.

The struggle for Ukrainian independence during the years 1917-1920 hastened the growth of Ukrainian national consciousness in North America. In Canada, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, many of whom had been educated in Canada, came into conflict with the Greek-Catholic bishop, and led the movement to establish the Ukrainian Greek-Orthodox Church of Canada in 1918. In America the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A. was established in 1920.

The success of the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches was a result of their independence from Rome or St. Petersburg-Moscow, their association with the Kozak past, their use of comprehensible Ukrainian instead of Church Slavonic in the liturgy, parish ownership of property and conciliar forms of government. The Church in the U.S. declared itself part of the UAOC established in Ukraine, and in 1924 Bishop Ioan Theodorovich arrived from Ukraine to lead the North American Ukrainian Churches. However, whereas the Church in Canada accepted him as its bishop, it nonetheless maintained for itself a separate Canadian entity administered from Winnipeg. The Canadian Church from its beginning combined Ukrainian and Canadian patriotism.

In the U.S. a group of Orthodox clergy and laity were dissatisfied from the start with the legitimacy of episcopal orders of Bishop Theodorovich and when a new group decided to convert from the Greek-Catholic Church in 1928, they joined forces and established the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of America (UOCA) and accepted the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

After World War II, the arrival of large numbers of Orthodox bishops, clergy and faithful from Europe, most of whom belonged to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) that had been re-established in 1942 in Poland, changed the face of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in North America. Most of these believers were from pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine, Volhynia and Bukovyna, and had very different traditions from the Galician immigrants and their children in North America. Beyond conflicts in mere cultural terms, the question of the "legitimacy" of Bishop Theodorovich's original consecration in the 1920s under the original UAOC was also an issue.

The desire to heal the breach among Ukrainian Orthodox in North America resulted in Bishop Theodorovich accepting reconsecration in 1949. As a result a number of Ukrainian Orthodox parishes of the Constantinople Patriarchate, (the UOCA), transferred to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A., which after 1951 was centered in South Bound Brook, N.J.

The Orthodox Church in Canada did not take part in these discussions. In 1947 the Church had replaced Bishop Teodorovych with Archbishop Mstyslav Skrypnyk of the UAOC who arrived from Europe. Conflicts between the consistory and Archbishop Mstyslav led to his resignation in 1950 and transfer to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A.

Since many of the bishops who arrived in North America after the war had been consecrated by bishops of the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church, in Church terms the events after World War II had resolved the question of legitimate episcopal consecration in both the U.S. and Canada. However the Ukrainian Churches were still not accepted as legitimate by the Orthodox groups in the U.S. or by the world Orthodox community. The Ukrainian Orthodox Churches rejected subordination to Constantinople and, unlike groups of Serbs or Bulgarians or Russians, they were not subordinated to a recognized Church in their home country. In addition, unlike emigré churches such as the Russian Synod Abroad, they did not accept a unified hierarchical administration. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A., the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (Europe, South America and Australia) were three separate metropolitanates with merely spiritual unity.

In the late 1990s the Ukrainian Orthodox in North America are racked by controversy and stymied as to how they should deal with independent Ukraine and the Church there.

A major reason for the change has been linguistic and cultural assimilation in North America and the passing of generations. Third- and fourth-generation parishioners, frequently of mixed families, no longer find the dedication to Ukraine and its customs so compelling. They frequently do not understand the Ukrainian language that drew their grandparents to the Church. In many cases, they wish the Church to be more active in general Orthodox affairs. Some have transferred to English-language parishes such as the Orthodox Church of America to meet these needs. By the same token, many of the Orthodox clergy found their exclusion by other Orthodox bodies troubling.

Paradoxically, it has been during a period of Ukrainian independence and the rebirth of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in Ukraine that the crisis has occurred in North America. Indeed the failure to establish a united autocephalous universally recognized Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Ukraine has been a catalyst in some ways for the decisions taken in Canada and the U.S.

Recent history of the Church in Canada and in the U.S. has been very different. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada began its negotiations with Constantinople in the late 1980s. Unlike the American Church, the Church in Canada had never aspired to form one Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the diaspora. It limited its involvement in Ukrainian Orthodox affairs in Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Given the smaller proportion of post-World War II immigrants in its flock, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada had a smaller constituency emotionally tied to Ukraine than did the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S.

In contrast, under the leadership of Metropolitan Mstyslav, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S. sought to establish one Church throughout the diaspora. After he became metropolitan of the UAOC in the West, the Church in the U.S. became closely tied to that in Europe, South America and Australia. The election in 1992 of Metropolitan Mstyslav as patriarch of the UAOC in Ukraine bound the faithful more closely to the Church in Ukraine. In addition, many more priests in the U.S. than Canada are new immigrants from Ukraine and Eastern Europe. These factors help explain why the resistance to submitting to Constantinople by the Church in the U.S. has been much greater than in Canada.

The Churches in Canada and Ukraine have varied constituencies and have espoused various viewpoints in the past. Many questions are being asked at present. How "Ukrainian" should the Churches remain? How integrated should they be with other Orthodox bodies? How closely should the faithful here be tied to Ukraine? How should they balance their traditional goal of Church independence with their desire for recognition by other Orthodox Churches? What is the respective role of the laity and the clergy?

A study of the past does not provide answers, but it should assist informed discussion. In addition to the encyclopedias mentioned above, readers may wish to consult some of the following publications, many of which are available from the church book stores in South Bound Brook and Winnipeg, from the Ukrainian book store in Edmonton, and from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Early History:

Ivan Wlasowsky, "Outline History of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church," two volumes (Bound Brook); Ihor Sevcenko, "Ukraine between East and West" (CIUS Press).

Church in Ukraine:

Frank E. Sysyn, "The Ukrainian Orthodox Question in the USSR" (Harvard Ukrainian Studies Fund); Bohdan Bociurkiw, "Soviet Religious Policy in Ukraine: Two Case Studies" (Harvard Ukrainian Studies Fund).

Ukrainians in North America:

Orest Martynovych, "Ukrainians in Canada, 1891-1924" (CIUS Press); Myron Kuropas, "The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations" (University of Toronto Press).

Ukrainian Churches:

Paul Yuzyk, "The Ukrainian Greek-Orthodox Church of Canada, 1918-1951" (Ottawa).

Numerous articles on the situation of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine have appeared in the last few years. A selection by Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn has been assembled in the collection, "Church and Nation in Contemporary Ukraine," which has been submitted to CIUS Press.

Dr. Frank Sysyn is the director of the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and editor-in-chief of the Hrushevsky Translation Project.