FACES AND PLACES: Polish pope, Russian patriarch (06/10/01)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Polish pope, Russian patriarch

Sitting in the Stockholm airport recently, Lesia and I struck up a conversation with an English-speaking Russian Orthodox priest waiting for an Aeroflot flight to Moscow.

The Russian impressed us as intelligent and quite spiritual in his approach to world affairs. After a while I questioned him about the attitude of Patriarch Aleksei II regarding Pope John Paul II's visit to Ukraine. "Why the opposition to the papal visit?"

"There are many problems," the priest responded. "The biggest one is the Greek-Catholic issue. Until that is resolved there can be no common language." Before I could question him further, the priest was asked to board his plane.

His response, of course, was no surprise. The Russian Orthodox Church has always opposed the Ukrainian Catholic Church, in tsarist times as well as during the Bolshevik era. There are many reasons, but the most significant one is the role of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the preservation of the Ukrainian identity in modern times, particularly after the annihilation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by Moscow. Russification is more difficult when there exists a religio-cultural institution as strong as the Ukrainian Catholic Church, especially when it enjoys the support of the Vatican.

During his visit to Ukraine later this month, Pope John Paul II will beatify 27 Ukrainian martyrs for the faith who died at the hands of the Bolsheviks and Nazis. Included are Bishop Mykola Charnetsky, Bishop Vasyl Velychkovsky, Bishop Mykyta Budka, Sister Josaphata Hordashevska, Father Oleksiy Zarytsky, and Father Klementii Sheptytsky, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky's brother. As archimandrite of the Studite order of monks, Father Klementii hid hundreds of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. He died in a Soviet labor camp.

In "Witness to Hope," a biography of the pope, George Weigel writes: "The Christian ideal for John Paul II is the martyr, the witness whose life completely coincides with the truth by being completely given to that truth in self-sacrificing love."

During the first 20 years of his pontificate the pope canonized 205 saints; 805 men and women were declared "blessed." These unprecedented numbers were made possible by a new apostolic provision titled "Divinus Perfectionis Magister" (The Master of Divine Perfection) which John Paul initiated. Issued on January 25, 1983, the document radically revised the process by which the Church recognizes saints. The legal process of old was replaced by an academic-historical procedure; "the Devil's Advocate was jettisoned along with the adversarial joust between the Promoter of the Faith and the candidate's defense attorneys," explains Mr. Weigel. "The new procedures were aimed at making the process swifter, less expensive, more scholarly, more collegial (local bishops now had the entire responsibility for assembling all the relevant data on a candidate) and better geared to producing results...The new procedures also took far more seriously Vatican II's vision of the plurality of forms of sanctity in the Church."

If there is one thing that the present pope has stressed throughout his priestly life, Mr. Weigel argues, it is freedom of religion. This is another reason the Russian patriarch is so opposed to the pope's mission. Religious freedom is a threat to Russian Orthodox hegemony. Under pressure from Aleksei II and his cohorts, President Boris Yeltsin signed a governmental decree in 1997 putting limits on all so-called "non-indigenous" faith expressions. The law required all faiths other than the Russian Orthodox to re-register with the government by December 31, 2000. According to Bishop Yulian Gbur, the Ukrainian Catholic Church was refused recognition in Russia, forcing it to go underground along with the Roman Catholic Church.

All of these contrivances are supported by President Vladimir Putin, who is busily constructing his version of "Moscow as the Third Rome," a centuries-old ideal that claims the Russian state can best survive if it remains loyal to three essential constructs: autocracy (as exemplified by a tsar, a director in Soviet times, or a potentate as president); orthodoxy (as exemplified by the Russian Orthodox Church or, in Soviet times, the Bolshevik creed); and "narodnichestvo" (as exemplified by a mystic Russian ethno-national synthesis which includes the Slavic-Rus' trinity of Russia, Belarus, and, most certainly, Ukraine).

The Russian Orthodox Church remains the centerpiece of President Putin's political strategy. He and Patriarch Aleksei II share a common KGB background, and the Patriarch continues to thrive as a result of largesse from the Kremlin. In his book "Dispatches from the Former Evil Empire," Moscow correspondent Richard Threlkeld reports that the Yeltsin government "granted the Patriarchate the right to import 50,000 tons of tobacco duty-free and to pocket the profits." Mr. Yeltsin also allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to import 100 million bottles of wine from Germany tax-free. In addition, the Patriarch "holds a 20 percent stake in something called the International Economic Partnership which, through most of the '90s, exported more than $2 billion worth of oil and oil products." Finally, the Church owns all or part of three banks. Small wonder that the patriarch tools around Russia in a Mercedes-Benz limousine followed by a Ford Explorer filled with bodyguards.

Given the sleazy background of Patriarch Aleksei II, why does the Roman Curia continue to romance this religious dissembler? Has the Roman Curia learned nothing from Pope Paul VI's disastrous policy of Ostpolitik? The only way the "Greek-Catholic issue" can be resolved to Russian (and some Ukrainian) satisfaction is if the Ukrainian Catholic Church disappears. This ain't gonna happen; deal with it.

Some Ukrainians argue that given the Pope's Polish-Catholic background, his presence in Ukraine is an insult to an Orthodox nation. Nonsense, Ukraine is no longer an Orthodox nation. Taken as a whole, Ukraine today is a nation of non-believers. In my mind, the Pope's visit will have an incredibly salutary effect at a time when morale in Ukraine has reached its lowest ebb since independence, and when support of the Western world is plummeting. Even Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarch Filaret, declared "non-canonical" by Aleksei II, has risen to the historical occasion and agreed to meet with the pope. This is an encouraging development.

Poles and Russians have been Ukraine's traditional enemies for centuries because neither was willing to recognize Ukraine as a nation-state. Today a Polish pope is elevating Ukraine's nationhood while a Russian patriarch plots Ukraine's demise. To whom do we turn?

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected].

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