FOR FATHER'S DAY

Blood and flowers

by the Rev. Andriy Chirovsky, S.Th.D

It is important to note that the voyage of Pope John Paul II (June 23-27) will not be the first papal visit to Ukraine. Pope Clement (c. 100 AD) died a martyr's death in Crimea. Pope Martin (mid-seventh century) was martyred in Kherson. So, what we're really hoping for is that this will be the first pope to visit Ukraine on a round-trip ticket. Since systematic treatment of Ukrainian Church history in all its complexity is made impossible by constraints of time and space, I shall simply choose a few illustrative moments and enlightening themes that will help to set up some context.

The interplay of union and freedom

When people - persons, nations, Churches - unite, if the union is free, it brings positive fruits.

Let us remember that freedom is an interior disposition, so that even forcible acts can be transformed into free decision - as, for example, in the passion and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is simply an aside to keep in mind, so as to avoid crushing pessimism in our brief flight through Ukrainian history.

The hierarchy of the Metropolia of Kyiv freely chose, in Orthodox synodal fashion, to pursue union with Rome in 1596. They surprised the Polish king, the papal nuncio, the Jesuits and even the pope himself. Let us remember that the Polish Jesuits had something very different in mind. They wanted the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian ) Orthodox to accept wholesale Polonization and absorption into the Roman rite. That is not what they got, and they were therefore quite surprised by the ecclesiological turnaround proposed by the Metropolia of Kyiv. Not all the fruits (because we live in a fallen state) but many of the fruits of this union would be good, including the free choice of many to accept martyrdom for the sake of this union (a case of tyranny being transformed into freedom).

Conversely, when union is not free or is not transformed into freedom, the fruits will be unhealthy. And so it was with the subordination of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - that part of the Kyivan Church that did not desire union with Rome - to the Moscow Patriarchate in 1686. The fruits are painful to this day, as both the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the two autocephalously minded Orthodox Churches of Ukraine can explain much better than I. The fruits of the expansion of tsarist hegemony which was accompanied by liquidation of the union in all newly acquired regions were also manifestly evil.

When St. Volodymyr chose Christianity - but in its Eastern, Constantinopolitan form - as the official religion of Rus' in 988, this free association with Byzantine Christianity and what Sir Dimitry Obolensky likes to call the "Byzantine Commonwealth" brought great religious and cultural - civilizational - fruits. When his sons Borys and Hlib chose to freely accept death rather than raise up arms against their brother Sviatopolk in self-defense, the Church of Kyiv received its first saints and a new category of sainthood had to be elaborated especially for them - certainly a fruit of the Holy Spirit and of free choice. When their other brother, Yaroslav the Wise, freely established ties with the various kingdoms of Latin Christianity (installing his daughter Anna as the only liberate member of the royal house of France and laying the groundwork for the reception of the defeated King Harold of England to take refuge in Kyiv with his family and retinue) these freely chosen acts of communion with a Latin Christian West and all the exchanges that accompanied them brought good fruits, even though the ecclesiastical situation between Rome and Constantinople was tense, to say the least.

This freedom to choose is something that lies at the heart of the Ukrainian Christian experience throughout the ages. It is a universal human need that is accentuated in the case of the Ukrainian people by their geopolitical location, on the fringes of European civilization. The very name ìÍpaªÌa (Ukraina) is a nickname for the ancient heartland of Kyivan Rus'. ìÍpaªÌa - Ukraine - means the land of the edge, the borderland, the fringe (not in the sense that many Russian historiographers would like it to be used, implying that the center of Rus' was far to the north and these southwestern lands were the outposts of Rus', but rather in the sense of the last country before the chaos of the nomad-controlled steppes to the East).

To live on the edge can be exciting, but the ambiguity of the situation can be simultaneously liberating and exhausting. When you are on the fringe, are you just inside Europe, or just outside it, or does the fault-line between civilizations run right through your heart?

When you live on the edge you cannot trust others so easily to make decisions for you (as helpful as they may want to be). And so, what we know today as the Greco-Catholic Church of Kyiv (or in an ethnic and therefore ecclesiologically unhealthy nomenclature - the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church) has decided to keep its options open by living antinomically as a Church that is Orthodox but in communion with Rome and as a Church that is Catholic but fundamentally Eastern.

The both/and of the great antinomies, the great paradoxes of the Christian faith, as expressed in the Three who are One, the Divine Savior who is perfectly human, the complete union with God of the believer who nevertheless retains his or her personhood, this antinomy of union without confusion is lived out daily by the "Kyivan Church of the Catholic Communion." This name, I believe, is the most proper name we can ascribe to what has been called the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (or even more improperly, the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church)._1_

The Autocephalous Orthodox of the Church of Kyiv also live an antinomic existence of a sort. Their cry for freedom in the 1920s, their second rebirth during World War II, and their third rising up in the 1990s was phrased in terms not of the "both/and," but rather of the "neither/nor": "Neither Rome nor Moscow!" they cried. Although a completely understandable vision of their own identity, this, unfortunately, has left them isolated on the stage of world Orthodoxy, and they are desperately seeking the approval of Constantinople (or of anyone in the worldwide Orthodox mainstream) for their autocephaly. What will happen in this extremely complicated case remains to be seen.

The Kyivan Church of the Catholic Communion - or at least influential groups within it - seek an antinomic response to the ecumenical question. Refusing to choose, as this refusal has been lived out in various ways throughout the centuries, between the Orthodox and Catholic communions, the Kyivan universalists desire the antinomic holy grail of double communion. "Why must we choose in your either/or world? We want full and visible communion with both Rome and Constantinople."

Yes, it is impossible (at least right now). Yes, it is complicated. Yes, it seeks a local solution to a universal problem. But it is still a goal worth pursuing. For, you see, the Kyivan Church has the simultaneous luxury and curse of never having lived through the fullness of the Enlightenment - that beautifully horrid time when the Cartesian reincarnation of the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction took root and undergirded a system for modernity, with its take-it-or-leave-it certainties in religion, politics and nearly all areas of human thought.

What an ironic fate - to have missed the wonders of the Enlightenment but to have suffered its worst consequences, Marxism and its evil twin consumerism, the nihilist offspring of the Enlightenment, which together brought forth today's culture of death! To have to face these bitter fruits of the Enlightenment unequipped with the Enlightenment's good fruit of critical thought - which allows one to see what's what and to look at oneself with painful objectivity - is a cruel fate, because then the inevitable result is that without real critical thought one is so easily reduced to superstition. As G. K. Cheserton put it, when one abandons the truth, the problem is not that one will believe nothing, but rather that one will believe anything. But, true to their antinomic heritage at the ambiguous frontiers of Europe, many Ukrainians today simultaneously believe both nothing and anything.

That is the situation into which Pope John Paul II will step on June 23, as, God willing, he kisses the soil of Ukraine in Kyiv. His visit is plagued by land mines at every turn.

The Moscow Patriarchate has been planting them systematically with Himmleresque efficiency, utilizing well the KGB training they received (and may perhaps continue to receive) under the leadership of "Agent Drozdov" otherwise known as Patriarch Aleksei II,_2_ a close ally of another erstwhile KGB agent by the name of President Vladimir Putin.

The autocephalous-minded Orthodox will no doubt look for photo opportunities to boost their legitimacy in the world. It is a pity no one will listen to their rather obvious reasoning because they have been so carefully branded as uncanonical outlaws by the Moscow Patriarchate, the last institution of the Russian empire.

The Greco-Catholics and the Roman Catholics will waste altogether too much time trying to show the holy father who loves him more and which is the better Catholic Church in Ukraine - a foolish game in a world of sound bites and 15-second news coverage, when solidarity and not petty competitiveness is so critically needed._3_

There will be those who think the pope is acting too Polish, simply by being himself and by speaking Polish on occasion. There will be others who still dream of Right-Bank Ukraine (from the Polish border to the Dnipro river and Kyiv itself) as a reconstituted "greater Poland." They will think he is not Polish enough! There will be those Catholics - both Eastern and Western - who will be offended that the holy father will not spit upon the Moscow Patriarchate no matter how it conspired with the Bolsheviks against the Catholics and no matter how bold and how bald are its lies about Roman and Eastern Catholics proselytizing and imaginary ongoing violence against the Orthodox._4_

And yet, the people wait. Not all - some of the newly rich have not set their Rolexes to ring out a chime of welcome to this man of little commercial interest. Others have never seriously considered the reality of Jesus and could hardly be expected to be interested in his earthly representative. Half of Ukrainians are unbaptized! That fact alone should make the leaders of all the Churches in Ukraine take stock of their awesome responsibilities and stop fighting each other, to stand united for Christ.

But there are those who wait. They waited for someone to stand up for them when the human race forgot for decades the world's largest banned religious body - the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church. Perhaps a few of them know that it was Pope John Paul II who demanded that the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church be decriminalized before he would allow Mikhail Gorbachev to enter Vatican City and have his futile opportunity on December 1, 1989, to try to prove to the world that they should trust this "kinder, gentler bolshevik." Yes, that was the very day on which the radios proclaimed the unbelievable news: that from that day forward Ukrainian Greco-Catholics would be allowed to register their parishes like the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. Most people have never noticed the obvious coincidence of dates and how it points to this pope's clear solicitude for his faithful of the Church of the Catacombs.

What do these people want?

The Kyivan Church of the Catholic Communion desperately wants the recognition of its patriarchal structure, because that alone will safeguard it from being swallowed up by a voracious Moscow Patriarchate in some future circumstance when the Cathedra Petri is not occupied by a savvy Slav and some shady deal may be brokered, as it apparently had been during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI._5_ A major archbishopric can be swallowed up by a Patriarchate. A Patriarchate cannot be swallowed up. It's as simple as that.

A future union of the Orthodox and Catholic Patriarchates of Kyiv is what is hoped for. Any absorption into the still colonially minded Moscow Patriarchate is abhorred. Besides, for the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, and the one which most clearly chose freely (even with 33 conditions_6_) to unite with Rome, to hold patriarchal status is simply a normal sign of this Church's maturity.

This Church wants a recognition of its saints. Since re-establishment of full and visible communion with Rome in 1596, only one member of this Church has been glorified as a saint by Rome._7_ The 20-some beatifications will go some of the distance to remedy the obvious gap, but will there be a pope to take the final step someday to canonize them? Beatification, according to Roman rules, is not yet recognition of sainthood. It is an important step along the way, but not the final one._8_

"And why," most Ukrainian Catholic faithful will ask with deep pain, "why is the holiest man they know, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, not on the current list of those to be beatified? So many of his spiritual children are. His case has been drawn out so long. The pope specifically chose, by personal request, to stay in the house in which Andrey Sheptytsky lived, but cannot beatify him. What is it that we do not know?_9_ Is it not time for the Synod of Bishops of this Church to return to the ancient practice of glorifying its own saints by Synodal action, not waiting for the Counter-Reformation processes which the juridically minded Roman Church instituted to recognize the saints of this Kyivan Church, or perhaps allowing both processes to go on independently of one another?

The faithful and hierarchy of this Church want an effective "ius speciale ad tempus,"_10_ promised by this pope to tie the three metropolias and numerous eparchies and exarchates of the dispersion to the Mother Church. This has been a painful waiting game throughout the 1990s.

They want recognition of at least all of modern-day Ukraine as the "ancestral territory" of the Church of Kyiv and the very recognition that they are the Church of Kyiv - that part of it which re-bound itself to Rome in 1596 - and not a provincial phenomenon limited to three or four oblasts in westernmost Ukraine._11_ They want real inclusion in Orthodox-Catholic ecumenical processes, with ecumenists elected by the Synod of Bishops and not just Roman curial appointees representing their Church. And they desire a guarantee - once and for all - that there will be no discussing of the future of this Church without the presence of this Church at the negotiating table._12_

They want the holy father to pressure the Ukrainian government to bring true freedom, real reforms to a land that possesses only external independence, but where the people still are not free. They want to see pressure put on the government to join most civilized countries by finally accrediting programs of theological education. They want a fully recognized Ukrainian Catholic University, with not only pontifical, but also civil accreditation, in order to work at the rebuilding of Ukrainian culture and society.

We need to remember that Ukrainian Catholics, unlike their Orthodox brothers and sisters, believe passionately in the blessedness of the fact that the pope is the citizen of no country but his own Vatican City State, and therefore the subject of no earthly power. He can criticize and cajole when necessary, and walk away free. It is this freedom of the ultimate earthly leadership of the Church that Ukrainian Catholics were willing to suffer and die for throughout the centuries.

That is why they will expect the pope to speak to political leaders frankly about the disappointing record of the first 10 years of Ukrainian independence. The image of Pope John Paul II in Cuba, simultaneously taking on both Havana and Washington is a powerful one, which gives people hope that at least this frail man will stand up to the oligarchs and the fractious parliamentarians who stand as obstacles to real reform and real freedom for the people.

The Kyivan Church of the Catholic Communion wants to assume its natural place of leadership among the Eastern Catholic Churches, not only because it is by far the largest, but also because its union with Rome was a free act of the Synod of Orthodox Bishops of the Kyivan Metropolia and carries no taint of proselytizing efforts by Rome. Let us remember here that it was the Byzantine emperors after the Council of Chalcedon who invented uniatism through the creation of parallel hierarchies in Alexandria and Antioch. Rome and its special-strike forces (especially the Jesuits) were only partially successful at imitating this tactic as Father Robert Taft, SJ, shows clearly in his paper today._13_

And last, but not least, the Kyivan Church of the Catholic Communion needs to maintain its antinomic ecclesiology, offering a gentle "yes, but" to Rome from an Eastern perspective, and a gentle "yes, but" to the Orthodox from a Catholic perspective.

What do the Orthodox want?

The two autocephalist Orthodox Churches crave recognition. Moscow does its best to have the world ignore these Churches as reckless and not serious. We can expect their representatives to stand (understandably) as close as possible to the holy father when photographers are around (and Patriarch Filaret will make sure photographers are around). Although they have no special meeting scheduled with the pope, they can be expected to use the holy father's meeting with the Council of Religions as a surrogate, carefully framing their photographs and phrasing their interpretations of every papal move.

If things do not go his way, Patriarch Filaret, until now welcoming to the pope, could turn unfriendly. I doubt it, however. He is clever enough to claim the moral high ground, having accurately read the world's shock at the way the holy father was received by the Greek Orthodox establishment. Patriarch Filaret will want to show how open-minded and ecumenical his Church is, compared with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church has no one as clever as Patriarch Filaret to maneuver through the brief availabilities of public meetings. But they can be expected to be welcoming to the pope. They will be hurt if the pope heeds the threats of Moscow and Moscow's Church in Ukraine, ignoring or shunning the autocephalists.

It will take the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit to guide Pope John Paul II through this quandary. I cannot see how he can emerge unscathed. In a sense, he cannot win. Whatever he does will be vilified by one Orthodox Church or another.

The Moscow Patriarchate can be expected to search for any mistake, any miscue - no matter how minor - in order to expose what they portray as the perfidy of the pope. The lies of recent months, the claims of secret papal plans of spiritual invasion, and the comparison of the holy father's visit with the invasion of Nazis 60 years earlier will continue. Any papal utterances of repentance and any request for mutual forgiveness will be met lukewarmly, just as Patriarch and Cardinal Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky's request for mutual forgiveness at the celebration of the Millennium of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus' in 1988 was coldly and completely ignored by the Moscow Patriarchate._14_

Here we can expect the Moscow Patriarchate to say: "Words. These are only beautiful words, but where is the proof in action?" Any action plan to serve the pastoral needs of the Catholics of Ukraine will continue to be labeled proselytism. Any papal support of the right of Ukrainian Catholics to simply exist will be presented by the Moscow Patriarchate as blatant expansionism and invasion of Orthodox territory. The rantings have become tiresome, even to the world press,_15_ which initially thought there might be some substance to the accusations. And any contact whatsoever with the autocephalist Orthodox will be described by Moscow as threatening the end of all future ecumenical relations._16_ It is pitiful how the evil one blinds us human beings, so that we do not see our sin and make fools of ourselves even more. Is it any wonder that more than half of Ukrainians are still unbaptized?

Of course, both Greco-Catholics and Roman Catholics will lose their cool at times, either lashing out in anger at Moscow's propaganda or mocking the folly of it all. This, too, will be a triumph for the evil one. Triumphalism of the Church leads only to the triumph of the devil for a while. There will be those among the Catholics who will refuse to recognize the suffering of the Orthodox (the Moscow Patriarchate included) under the Soviet regime. By doing so, and by identifying all Orthodox as collaborators with the Bolshevik regime, these Catholic zealots will sin grievously, excusing themselves with the childish "They did it first." Truly, human folly will undo much of the possible good fruits of the papal visit.

The government, like so many before it, will try to use the presence of the holy father to bolster its very tarnished image. He will speak the truth to the rulers of the land. But will they have ears to hear?

The people will hear and the people will judge for themselves. It is a pity they did not know the skiing, mountain-climbing pope of not so long ago, to see what a sacrifice he is making in coming to visit now in his present sickly state. Too bad that they will not see how he has poured himself out "for the life of the world" these 20-some years to arrive at his present frailty.

It's too bad that once the celebrations are over, the Roman understanding of the concept of Church territory will continue to be dominant, with Eastern Catholics locked onto reservations, like the aboriginals of North America, while the Latin Church apparently enjoys the whole cosmos as its territory.

Some conclusions

It's too bad it will all pass so quickly. If the recognition of the Patriarchate of the Kyivan Church of the Catholic Communion does not come at this time, then, I fear, the holy father will have left (unintentionally perhaps) an open wound on the Body of Christ. I can only take solace in the fact that I will never be pope. Such awesome responsibilities will never be mine. Here and there I will offer an opinion of little consequence with little or no personal authority with which to give it legitimacy.

I hope that Patriarch and Cardinal Lubomyr Husar's recent emphasis at the May Consistory of Cardinals on sanctity - real sanctity, the kind that places demands, the kind that hurts - will carry the day_17_ in the visit to Ukraine of the beloved man we Catholics call holy father, and in all ecumenical dealings to come. The people of Ukraine will see him, and they will hear his voice. His voice will be heard in the Ukrainian language, among others. This in itself will restore a great measure of dignity to a downtrodden people who were told by their neighbors - both Russians and Poles - that the Ukrainian language is fit for communication with livestock at best. The pope will prove them right, in an ironic sense. The Good Shepherd will speak in Ukrainian to his Ukrainian lambs.

Those words will be recorded, and studied, and interpreted, and lived by for centuries to come. I hope with all my might that the holy father will grace us with an apostolic letter on his return to Rome, where he can add the necessary things for which there was not enough time during the visit, or for which he needed to wait until he experienced Ukraine personally. Such a letter of reflection after the fact will be of great importance.

What a time in which to live! What a grace it is to be able to discuss the long-awaited visit of the pope to the Church of Kyiv - not as a dream, but as a scheduled reality. What a blessing it will be to welcome Pope John Paul II to Ukraine on a round trip ticket!

1. It is important to note that the Holy Synod of Bishops of this Church has begun experimenting with this name, using it occasionally and slowly exposing the membership to such nomenclature. Its first sustained public use would probably be linked with the ecumenical forum called "The Kyivan Church Study Group," which began operating in the early 1990s. [Back to Text]

2. The highly respected Keston News Service publicized the facts of Patriarch Aleksei's involvement in the Estonian KGB from February 1958 on, in an article by Felix Corley, "KNS Russia: The Patriarch and the KGB," Thursday, September 21, 2000. The Keston Institute at Oxford was kind enough to furnish me with a photocopy of the extract from the "Report on agent/operational work of the Fourth Department of the KGB attached to the Council of Ministers of the Estonian SSR for 1958, signed by Chairman of the Estonian KGB [Col. I.P.] Karpov and Head of the Fourth Department, Belyayev, as found in the Estonian State Archive, record group 131, file 393, pp. 125-126. These Estonian records may well have been moved since to FSB Archives in Russia. The final entry on agent Drozdov is from February 1988: "An order of the USSR KGB chairman was prepared to award to Agent 'Drozdov' the Certificate of Honor." FSB Central Archive, f.6, op.11, por. No. 148, d.Ch-175.t.1,p.209. Thus, Patriarch Aleksei II was not only an agent of the KGB, he was singled out to receive honors for thirty years of outstanding service. [Back to Text]

3. Roman Catholics will probably want to gloat over the fact that the pope will celebrate the Roman liturgy first on his arrival in Kyiv, and some Greco-Catholics will see it as a great insult. All involved should remember that the pope is not only the "Ecumenical Hierarch," i.e., the head of the worldwide Catholic communion, he is also the Patriarch of the West. That is why, in the territory which he is visiting, in which the Orthodox and the majority of the Catholics follow the Byzantine tradition, it is better for the patriarch of the West to stick to his own Latin rite and to let the Byzantine hierarchs celebrate the Byzantine liturgy, in which he will respectfully participate on two occasions. In Rome, in his own St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II did act on several occasions as main celebrant of the Byzantine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, at the invitation and with the concelebration of the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy and other Byzantine Catholic hierarchies. [Back to Text]

4. Patriarch Aleksei and Metropolitan Volodymyr of the Moscow Patriarchate can complain about the painful "destruction" (implosion would be the more accurate word) of their dioceses in western Ukraine and ascribe this to the activity of Ukrainian Catholics reclaiming their own churches (alas, the latter item being a detail they somehow never have time to include in their vitriolic press releases), but the fact is their main problem is with the other two Orthodox Churches in Ukraine. There is a rather significant freely chosen Orthodox presence in predominantly Catholic Western Ukraine (more than there has been in 300 years). The problem is that these significant numbers of Orthodox simply do not want to belong to the Moscow Patriarchate. In an attempt to divert attention from this fact, the Moscow Patriarchate has time and again claimed that there is violence being perpetrated by Ukrainian Greco-Catholics against the Orthodox. But official joint commissions to deal with such cases have had nothing to report or study for years. [Back to Text]

5. Such an arrangement is mentioned in the Spiritual Testament of Patriarch and Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. It is also the most obvious reason why in 1977 he ordained Fathers Lubomyr Husar (today Patriarch and Cardinal), Ivan Choma and Stepan Chmil to the episcopate without the permission or knowledge of Pope Paul VI. He wanted these three bishops to safeguard the continuity of the apostolic succession of the Kyivan Church of the Catholic Communion. Having been an eyewitness to the heinous behavior of the so-called "Quadripartite Commission" in 1990, I saw first-hand the results of such agreements. The representatives of the Vatican, although themselves ethnic Ukrainians, did not abide by rules agreed upon with Patriarch and Cardinal Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky, nor did they use the term "Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church" in deliberations with the Moscow Patriarchate. Instead, they spoke of "Communities of Catholics of the Byzantine Rite." It takes no great leap of logic to conclude that there was to be no Church as such, simply "communities," presumably under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic bishops. This was the death knell for the Greco-Catholic Church precisely as Church. That is why Archbishop Volodymyr Sterniuk broke up the deliberations and declared them null and void, something that, as he told me, was "the hardest thing I ever had to do in my whole life - seemingly to disobey the Vatican." He and the rest of the underground bishops were vindicated in June, 1990, when Pope John Paul II called them all to Rome to signal his total support for them and to give them full recognition as bishops of a living Church. [Back to Text]

6. It is a pity how few Ukrainian Greco-Catholics know about the rather savvy demands the bishops of the Kyivan Metropolia placed before Rome and the Polish-Lithuanian government in 1596. The latest English translation can be found in Borys Gudziak, "Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Union of Brest" (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996). [Back to Text]

7. St. Josaphat Kuntsevich (1580?-1623) [Back to Text]

8. St. Josaphat was beatified in 1643, but canonized (recognized fully as a saint and, as the Orthodox terminology would put it, "glorified") only in 1867. [Back to Text]

9. One very reliable source publicly explained that the late Cardinal Wyszynski of Poland twice personally blocked the process of Metropolitan Andrey, whom he saw as a Ukrainian nationalist, and whom, ironically, Ukrainian nationalists often saw as too soft on the Poles. [Back to Text]

10. Eastern Catholic Church Law is divided into General Law, which applies to all Eastern Catholic Churches, and Particular Law, which belongs to each Eastern Catholic Church individually. When the heads of all of the Eastern Catholic Churches protested that the new law, promulgated in 1991, did not have sufficient provisions tying the diaspora Churches to their Mother Churches, Pope John Paul II personally promised to consider a "special law for the time being" which would regulate such relations. Little progress has been made in this regard. [Back to Text]

11. See: "Study Paper: The Territory of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church," Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 35 (1994) pp. 313-385. [Back to Text]

12. In July 1995, in the name of the Kyivan Church Study Group, then meeting officially with Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Council of Christian Unity, at the council's offices in Rome, this was made absolutely clear by myself and others. It has been restated by Ukrainian Greco-Catholic bishops individually and together, on several occasions. [Back to Text]

13. "The Problem of Uniatism and the Healing of Memories: Anamnesis not Amnesia." Father Taft's paper was delivered in Rome in Italian. A similar paper, in English, was delivered at the University of St. Michael's College (Toronto) Kelly Lecture in December 1, 2000. [Back to Text]

14. At the time, Patriarch Myroslav was sharply criticized by Ukrainian nationalists who claimed that Ukrainian Catholics have nothing for which to ask forgiveness from Moscow. He calmly replied, "for the anger in our hearts, at the very least." [Back to Text]

15. See Frank Brown, "Official Denies Church to be Razed for Papal Visit" CNS May 8, 2001, where we read: "Nella Chukivska, a Russian Orthodox parishioner at the Church of St. Vladimir who took part in the May 3 protest, contradicted her church headquarters' statement regarding the demonstration which she said drew about 45 people. 'We have no problem with the Catholics.' Chukivska said in an interview from the Lviv office of her bishop, Ukrainian Orthodox Archbishop Augustyn. 'This is between our canonical Orthodox church and the schismatics.'" See also "most Ukrainians Favor Papal Visit, Survey Says" Zenit.org, Kyiv, May 21, 2001. For a surprising assessment of recent anti-papal harangues see the article by Rod Dreher, columnist for the New York Post, "When will the Orthodox Learn to Love the Pope?" in The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2001. Patrick Cockburn's "Russian Orthodox Church Vents Its Fury at John Paul's Visit to Western Ukraine" The Independent, June 8, 2001, includes this telling analysis: "The rhetoric coming from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy has all the venom of one of Ian Paisley's diatribes against the papacy." It seems that the volume of that rhetoric is finally turning against Moscow as journalists begin to relegate it to the category of venting and diatribes. [Back to Text]

16. Sadly, the world press continues to repeat the dubious contention that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is Ukraine's largest. It certainly has the most parishes. But survey after survey shows that most Orthodox believers in Ukraine identify themselves with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate. It is not difficult to believe that, given the choice, many people who have only the possibility of attending a Moscow-affiliated parish would gladly join one of the Kyivan Patriarchate. It is surprising that more serious studies of this demographic discrepancy have not been carried out. [Back to Text]

17. Cindy Wooden, "Ukraine Cardinal says 'radical holiness key to Christian unity,'" CNS May 22, 2001. [Back to Text]

Father Andriy Chirovsky, S.Th.D. is the founder and current director of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, Faculty of Theology, St. Paul University, in Ottawa, where he holds the Peter and Doris Kule Chair of Eastern Christian Theology and Spirituality.

This paper was delivered at a joint international conference in Rome, sponsored by the Pontifical Oriental Institute, the Lviv Theological Academy and the Ottawa-based Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute, at the Pontifical Gregorian University on May 25 and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute on May 26.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 17, 2001, No. 24, Vol. LXIX

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