COMMENTARY: Are Ukrainians really that hard to count, or is the Western media mentally challenged? (07/15/01)

COMMENTARY

Are Ukrainians really that hard to count, or is the Western media mentally challenged?

by Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky

The pope's visit to Ukraine was historic and extraordinary, and nothing can ever detract from that. But the trip also generated a substantial amount of misinformation about Ukraine in and by the Western media - misinformation which, with just a little bit of preparatory work, any competent journalist should have been able to avoid.

In connection with the pope's visit, numerous leading Western newspapers repeated variations on the claim that the Church in Ukraine that was opposed to the pope's visit represents a "majority" of Ukraine's population, and the related claim that, in contrast, the Catholics merely constitute a small minority.

Thus, to cite three examples, the Independent of London referred on June 24 to Aleksei II as "head of the Russian Orthodox Church to which most Ukrainians give allegiance ..."; The Washington Post described Ukraine as on June 26 "this Orthodox majority country ..."; and the Los Angeles Times on June 24 reported that "Orthodox believers make up more than half of Ukraine's population of 50 million, far outnumbering an estimated 6 million Catholics."

If the Russian Orthodox Church represents a majority of the population in Ukraine, and if that majority dwarfs the number of Ukraine's Catholics, then it might have been understandable both why the pope's visit could have generated so much "controversy" and why the Western media devoted so much attention to that "controversy." Makes perfect sense, right? Well, not quite. Let's look at the numbers.

Ukraine's population is a little under 50 million. There are approximately 11 million Orthodox. There are about 6 million Catholics (about 5 million Byzantine-rite Catholics and just under a million Latin-rite Catholics). Okay, so maybe the Orthodox do not come anywhere close to constituting a majority in Ukraine (i.e., more than 25 million), but 11 million Orthodox is still more than 6 million Catholics.

(If you're wondering about who the 33 million non-Orthodox and non-Catholics are, the large majority consists of non-believers, and the rest are Protestants, Jews, Muslims and other believers.)

Thus, perhaps at least as far as the numbers are concerned, Aleksei II may have had a point to his bellyaching, and it therefore made sense for the Western media to devote all that attention to this "controversy."_1_ Right? Well, not exactly. Let's go back to the numbers again.

As I understand it, of the 11 million Orthodox, about 7.5 million belong to the Moscow Patriarchate, over 2 million to the Kyiv Patriarchate, and about 1.5 million to the Autocephalous Church. But, in contrast to the Orthodox of both the Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodox of the Kyiv Patriarch and the Autocephalous Church welcomed the pope's visit.

So, it turns out that 7.5 million Orthodox were opposed to the pope's visit, and 9 million to 9.5 million Catholics and Orthodox welcomed it. In other words, even if one only focuses on Ukraine's Orthodox and Catholics, a majority of them favored the pope's visit, and those who opposed it constituted but a minority. And if one focuses on the Ukraine's entire population, we find that the 7.5 million Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox constitute merely 15 percent of Ukraine's population. So is it at least fair to say that 15 percent of Ukrainians opposed the pope's visit? Probably not, as even that figure may be far too high. As reported by various public opinion polls in Ukraine, only between 4 and 6 percent of the Ukrainian population opposed the pope's visit.

If only 4-6 percent, and, at the absolute most 15 percent, of Ukraine's population opposed the pope's visit, how in the world did that small minority turn into a "majority" that then went on to be the subject of so much Western media attention? The answer seems to lie somewhere in a combination of journalistic laziness and KGB alchemy.

What does the KGB have to do with anything? In a June 26 article in the Moscow Times by Yevgenia Albats, it was reported that Aleksei Ridiger, a.k.a Aleksei II, is a decorated KGB agent. And who was the source of the "majority is opposed to the pope's visit" fabrication? Read Aleksei II's own words during a Russian television interview on June 25 (as reported by the BBC Monitoring Service on June 26): "It would appear that simple good manners require that they should have waited till the main Church, the main confession to which the majority of Ukraine's population belongs, issued an invitation or agreed to the visit by the head of the Roman Catholic Church. That main confession was asking for the visit not to be made ..."

Isn't anyone in the Western media that reported on the purported "controversy" aware that many Russian spokespersons lie as effortlessly as the rest of us breathe? And, can't any of these media people count for themselves? Lastly, did anyone in the Ukrainian Catholic Church prepare and distribute in advance of the pope's arrival press packets to the media with a fact sheet listing such basic information as how many people in Ukraine belong (or do not belong) to which confession?

1. If was, of course, outrageous for Aleksei II to say any of the things he did regarding the pope's visit to Ukraine, but I am focusing solely on the issue of numbers. [Back to Text]

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