PERSPECTIVES: Andrey Sheptytsky, Servant of God (12/03/00)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Andrey Sheptytsky, Servant of God

World War II ended more than 50 years ago, but it's still making news as experts and commissions grapple with the unresolved questions and unfinished business the war left in its wake. This process has more than passing interest for Ukrainians. After all, the Nazis occupied Ukraine for three years and turned its territory into a major battlefield of the war.

One of the contentious issues scholars and others are now pondering is the role of the Catholic Church during World War II. This past October the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, consisting of scholars appointed by the Holy See and the International Jewish Committee, released a preliminary report on "The Vatican and the Holocaust." The Commission Report makes a point of reserving judgement and instead asks a lot of questions, many of which cast prominent people in a harsh light.

One person, though, is held up as a pillar of moral authority and courage in confronting the Nazis and the Holocaust: Andrey Sheptytsky, archbishop-metropolitan of the Eastern Rite Catholic Church of western Ukraine. He was spiritual leader there from 1899 to 1944. Between the two world wars this region was part of Poland until the Soviets absorbed it in 1939. The Nazis then occupied it in 1941-1944.

In asking what Pope Pius XII knew and when he knew it, the commission relates how Metropolitan Sheptytsky sent a report to the Vatican in August 1942, describing the horrors unfolding in Ukraine. By that time the Nazis had unfurled in its full fury the genocidal policy they called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" and history now records as the Holocaust.

Assessing Sheptytsky, the commission concludes that "No other high-ranking Catholic churchman, to the best of our knowledge, provided such direct eye-witness testimony and expressed concern for Jews qua Jews (and as primary targets of German bestiality) in the same way."

What is more, Sheptytsky was not just passing the buck to the pope. In a breathtaking act of courage - matched by few if any leaders in occupied Europe - Sheptytsky had written a letter to the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, condemning the murder of Jews and protesting the Nazi policy of recruiting individual Ukrainians to help in that campaign.

From other sources we know that Sheptytsky did not leave it at that. Writing in 1960, Holocaust survivor Kurt Lewin describes how his father, the chief rabbi of Lviv, Dr. Jechezkiel Lewin, went to Metropolitan Sheptytsky after the Nazi invasion and asked for help. Sheptytsky promised to do what he could. He wrote to Himmler and he wrote to the pope. He also addressed his own congregation.

In a pastoral letter titled "Thou Shalt Not Kill," he forbade all Ukrainian Catholics from direct or indirect participation in the extermination of Jews. The letter was read in all 4,500 churches, chapels, monasteries and schools under his jurisdiction. Doing so took enormous courage, not only from Sheptytsky, but also from every one of the priests who read the letter and the Christians who heeded it.

The Nazis were serious, dead serious, about killing Jews. In just half a year from 1943 to 1944, the Nazis formally executed a hundred Ukrainians for helping or concealing Jews. Many others were shot on the spot and never listed in official reports. To make sure everyone got the message, announcements of the formal hangings and shootings were printed in newspapers and plastered on walls.

Sheptytsky, though, was undaunted. He opened his monasteries, convents, orphanages and hospitals, and even his own private residence, to shelter Jews. A small army of monks, priests and nuns risked their lives and shared their meager rations to save whomever they could. Kurt Lewin relates, for example, how one Jewish woman, already married and in the early stage of pregnancy, entered a convent as a novice. It was all a facade. Metropolitan Sheptytsky was just keeping his word to Rabbi Lewin.

The fearlessness that Sheptytsky demonstrated in confronting the Nazis over the Holocaust was characteristic of him throughout his long career as a religious leader. Consecrated bishop in 1899 at the young age of 34, when western Ukraine was part of Austria-Hungary, he was always an outspoken advocate for his people. That's why the invading tsarist army arrested him during World War I. After the war, when Poland took over western Ukraine, Sheptytsky spoke out against that government's repressive "pacification" policy against its Ukrainian citizens.

In keeping with his ecumenical beliefs, Sheptytsky also condemned the government for destroying the churches of Orthodox believers. In 1932 and 1933 Sheptytsky took on a bigger adversary when he denounced Communism and Stalin's Terror-Famine in Soviet Ukraine. Tragically, his words were largely ignored, just as they would be a decade later when Jews, instead of Ukrainians, were being slaughtered - but that didn't stop him from doing what was right.

The Nazi retreat from Ukraine in the summer of 1944 brought no relief for Sheptytsky and his people. The NKVD replaced the Gestapo, and the Red Army supplanted the Wehrmacht. Ukrainians in Galicia were between a rock and a hard place, forced from the frying pan into the fire. Anticipating the same policies and tactics he had denounced a decade before, Sheptytsky took steps to prepare his Church for the Soviet take-over. He secretly, consecrated Josyf Slipyj as his successor and introduced reforms to allow his Church to function in the underground.

In November 1944 Sheptytsky died. Within a year his fears were realized and the Soviets violently disbanded his Church. As he had foreseen, the faithful carried on "in the catacombs." In 1968 Pope Paul VI honored Archbishop-Metropolitan Sheptytsky with the title "Servant of God," the first step toward canonization. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the Ukrainian Catholic Church was officially restored.

Today Archbishop-Metropolitan Sheptytsky deserves much more than a footnote to a preliminary report on the Vatican and the Holocaust. Like Raul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, he confronted evil head-on - in his case, in both its Communist and National Socialist forms. Next year in June - after more than 22 years as pontiff - John Paul II will visit Ukraine. I fervently hope that the pope, who himself had stood up to the evils of Nazism and Communism, takes that opportunity to honor Andrey Sheptytsky, a great man who defended all people regardless of their background and by so doing, became a Servant of God.

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