Scholars offer assessments of papal visit to Ukraine

Serhii Plokhy

Pope John Paul II's visit to Ukraine was an event of definitive historic significance as recorded on the pages of this newspaper. The Ukrainian Weekly deemed it appropriate to turn to scholars with expertise on the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the religious situation in Ukraine and relations among the Vatican, the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Russian Orthodox Church - to comment on the relevance, immediate consequences and potential impact of Pope John Paul II's visit in Ukraine and throughout the region. The series was prepared by Ika Koznarska Casanova.

SERHII PLOKHY is director of the Ukrainian Church Studies Program and associate director of the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. He serves as deputy editor of the Hrushevsky Translation Project and co-edited Mykhailo Hrushevsky's "History of Ukraine-Rus'," Volume 7: "The Cossack Age to 1625" (Edmonton and Toronto, 1999). His latest book, "The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine," will be published by Oxford University Press later this year. He also authored a number of articles on the role of history and religion in the shaping of the Russian and Ukrainian identities.

Q: Would you please offer a general assessment of Pope John Paul II's visit to Ukraine, with particular reference to the coverage by the Western press?

A: Pope John Paul II's five-day visit to Ukraine is long over, but discussions about its results, significance and media coverage are still going on. For most Western reporters it was a tough job to cover the pope's visit to an ex-Soviet country, caught between Europe and Russia and currently recovering from its worst political scandal ever. On top of that, there is the extremely complicated history of Orthodox-Catholic relations in the region, with the Orthodox majority currently split into three factions and the Catholic minority divided between Roman and Greek-Catholics.

Judging by the stories presented to the Western reader, the media took refuge from all these Ukrainian complexities by focusing on the significance of the visit for Moscow-Vatican relations, a field much more familiar to the correspondents who cover mainly Russian developments for their newspapers and to media outlets in Western Europe and North America.

Statements by Patriarch Aleksei II of Moscow and his hierarchs protesting the pope's visit to predominantly Orthodox Ukraine gave the media a subject that it found easy to follow. The first days of the visit were viewed almost exclusively through the prism of Moscow's protests against the pontiff's visit to a country no longer subject to Moscow's control.

Based on the faulty premise of the Moscow Patriarchate's complete control over the Orthodox faithful in Ukraine, the main story line went as follows. Spurned by the Orthodox, the pope was given a chilly reception in predominantly Orthodox eastern Ukraine and was warmly welcomed only as he drew nearer to his native Poland in western Ukraine. Left out of the story was Ukraine itself - its life, its faithful and the significance of the visit for its affairs.

The real story overlooked by such coverage was that of the survival and resurgence of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, banned and persecuted by the communist authorities. Its re-emergence was greatly assisted by the actions of John Paul II, who did not give in to the Moscow Patriarchate's current threats, just as he proved impervious to them in the late 1980s.

The story that was overlooked was that of the embattled Church overcoming the old tradition of hostilities with the Orthodox and establishing new, peaceful relations with Ukrainian Orthodox communities in the area. It is the story of the Ukrainian people rejecting the message of religious intolerance and hatred coming from Moscow and embracing the message of tolerance and reconciliation coming from the pope, as was pointed out by Prof. Olga Andiewsky (history department, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario), in her insightful e-mail reports from Kyiv.

Q: What is your assessment of the reaction of the Russian Orthodox Church to the pope's visit, an issue which, as you have pointed out, has received the most coverage in the Western media?

A: There is little doubt that the pope has emerged as victor from the showdown with Moscow, while Patriarch Aleksei II has suffered a major defeat. At stake in this case was not only the pope's freedom of movement in the post-Soviet space, but also the Moscow Patriarchate's grip on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Back home, the Russian Orthodox Church achieved a major success when it advocated restrictive measures against its competitors, which were adopted by the Russian Duma and signed into law by Boris Yeltsin in 1997. It tried to impose similar rules on Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries by seeking to bar the pope from visiting them.

Patriarch Aleksei did not succeed in this attempt, which not only annoyed the Ukrainian government, but also failed to obtain support from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who went on record as welcoming the pope's visit to Ukraine. After the visit, the embarrassed Moscow Patriarchate was reduced to explaining that there were differences between Church and state in their approach to the pope's pilgrimage and to warning the people of the former Soviet republics that papal visits would not put them on the fast track for European integration.

The pope, who had opposed the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 and remained steadfastly loyal to [Mikhail] Gorbachev's vision of a reformed and liberalized Soviet Union with religious freedom for all denominations, now clearly upstaged the Moscow Patriarchate on its former "canonical territory."

John Paul II not only undertook a visit to Kyiv, "the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy," but also announced his intention to visit Russia's allies in the Caucasus, Armenia, and its Central Asian neighbor, Kazakstan. The pope's visit to Ukraine demonstrated his determination to continue his trips to the former Soviet Union and left no doubt of his firm support for Ukraine's Greek-Catholic Church. Clearly, John Paul II has no intention of sacrificing the Uniate Church which emerged from the 1596 Union of Brest for the sake of better relations with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Q: What, in your view, will be the effect of John Paul II's visit on the position of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in Church and civil affairs in Ukraine?

A: The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church received an enormous boost from the pope's visit, which dramatically increased the Church's visibility and importance in Ukrainian society, and assured it of an important role in future relations between Western and Eastern Christianity. The beatification of 28 Ukrainian Greek-Catholic martyrs not only highlighted the Church's heroic history of struggle and survival under the oppressive rule of the Communist and Nazi regimes, but also increased its prestige in the Catholic world, giving it an edge in its unofficial competition with Ukraine's Roman Catholic community, which is significantly smaller but better represented in Rome.

Q: Are there any setbacks for the UGCC emanating from this visit?

A: What has been overlooked so far by many observers of the religious scene in Ukraine is that the pope's visit, despite all its positive significance for Ukrainian Greek-Catholics, also proved a major setback for some of their long-cherished plans and aspirations.

This applies, first and foremost, to Rome's recognition of patriarchal status for the Church. For many supporters of the patriarchal movement, the pope's visit to Ukraine was the last hope of achieving this goal in their lifetime. After all, it was the pope himself who, prior to the disintegration of the USSR, promised the Ukrainian bishops a patriarchate once they acquired their canonical territory in Ukraine. The pope has not yet fulfilled his promise, and with his visit to Ukraine now receding into history, it is unlikely that he will do so in the future. The Vatican's unwillingness to upset Moscow even more should probably be counted among the reasons for the pope's silence on the issue of the patriarchate.

Another setback for Ukrainian Greek-Catholics has been the Vatican's refusal to make any substantial progress on the beatification of the Church's major figure, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. Moscow's position on this issue, as well as unfounded accusations of the metropolitan's collaboration with the Nazis, are most likely responsible for the lack of progress in this area. Meanwhile, the beatification of 28 Greek-Catholic martyrs by the pope during his visit to Ukraine created a situation that many members of the Church find difficult to comprehend. While the Vatican has basically placed the beatification of Metropolitan Andrey on hold, the metropolitan's brother, Archimandrite Klymentii Sheptytsky - a less prominent and more controversial figure in Ukrainian circles - has been beatified as a priest who died as a result of Soviet persecution.

Nevertheless, there is some hope that the pope's visit will help to bring about a more favorable treatment of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, whose bishops, in contradistinction to their Roman Catholic counterparts in Ukraine, are not allowed to have bishoprics in the eastern part of the country. The grounds for this restriction lie in the Vatican's desire not to upset Moscow as well as in the lack of historical precedent for Greek-Catholic eparchies in traditionally Orthodox areas of Ukraine. One of the consequences of the pope's visit is that the most recent Church synod, which took place in Lviv in early July 2001, approved the creation of exarchates for the Odesa and Donetsk areas. There is also a well-founded hope that the papal visit will improve the Ukrainian government's treatment of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and speed up government accreditation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Theological Academy in Lviv.

Such hope stems from the fact that Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma has emerged from the visit as one of its major beneficiaries. Both the pope and the leaders of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church went out of their way not to offend the president, who was recovering from the worst political crisis of his career. Not only was President Kuchma spared public criticism on the part of the pope, but at the request of a prominent cleric, the president was well received by the Church's faithful who numbered over 1 million at the UGCC liturgy in Lviv.

Apparently, the pope was genuinely grateful to President Kuchma for issuing the invitation to visit Ukraine despite the protests of the Moscow Patriarchate's powerful lobby in Kyiv. For his part, President Kuchma should have been grateful to the pope for ending his international isolation, imposed on the Ukrainian leader de facto by Western leaders ever since the beginning of the tape scandal. Appearing with the pope in front of television cameras also gave President Kuchma legitimacy in the eyes of his own citizens, many of whom still hold him responsible for the death of the opposition journalist Heorgii Gongadze.

Q: What was the major significance of the pope's visit?

A: The main outcome of the visit was the pope's successful attempt to cross the new East-West divide that is increasingly becoming a reality in Europe - a divide that puts Ukraine in the same camp as Moscow, as opposed to Warsaw, Vienna and Rome. The pope's message was one of love and hope. He encouraged Ukrainians to rediscover their European Christian roots and values, reassuring them in more ways than one that their independence is valued in the West and that Ukrainians as a nation are still welcomed there.

There are signs that this message has been received and appreciated. For the short period of time that the world focused on Ukraine for reasons other than nuclear arsenals or political scandals, Ukrainians rose to the occasion. By accepting the pope and rejecting Moscow's protests, the Ukrainian people showed the world that their country is an independent actor on the world scene, capable of choosing for itself its spiritual values and orientations.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 5, 2001, No. 31, Vol. LXIX

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