Kyivan Church Study Group, an ecumenical dialogue team for our times

by Father Andriy Chirovsky and Roma M. Hayda

The following is a collaborative effort of a committed lay leader of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and one of the initiators of the Kyivan Church Study Group. The authors bring different perspectives to the issue at hand, but agreed to pool their efforts in order to speak simultaneously at various levels to diverse constituencies in the Ukrainian Churches.

Ukrainians were stunned by the recent explosion of activity in the ecumenical movement aimed at halting recognition of the Ukrainian Catholic Patriarchate. This time Ukrainian Catholics and Orthodox alike were incensed by the political moves in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, but by and large found little recourse among their respective hierarchies or lay leaders.

The usual fallback position among Ukrainian Catholics is at best a clinging to some perceived historical right, the post-Vatican II documents and the promises made by Pope John Paul II, with the hope that these will force the right thing to occur eventually. At worst, we tend to relegate ecumenism to the dung-heap of cynicism or to become indifferent toward ecumenism, in effect abrogating our responsibility to the ecumenical process in either case. This is not to say that Patriarch Lubomyr Husar and the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (UGCC) were inactive, or that the tireless ecumenist of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Vsevolod (Majdansky) sat by the wayside doing nothing - quite the contrary. But we have to admit that with our absence from the broader world's ecumenical radar screen, the attention of official international ecumenical groups is elsewhere.

In this article we will identify the Ukrainian Church in Communion with Rome as the "Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church." The term "Greco-Catholic Church" is a better translation for the original "Hreko-Katolytska Tserkva," "Greek-Catholic Church," which would translate into Ukrainian as "Hretska-Katolytska Tserkva." The point of mentioning anything Greek at all is to designate the Greek, or rather Constantinopolitan, provenance of Kyivan Christianity.

In order to change the current reliance of professional ecumenists on biased information, we have to take responsibility for and leadership in the ecumenical dialogue that touches upon our own Church life. This needs to be done not sporadically, but on a continuous basis, and it needs to occur within the structures of the worldwide ecumenical movement. For this, two things are needed. First of all, we need a knowledgeable and dedicated ecumenical team, and secondly, we must have well-informed followers - a network of support from interested non-specialists - in our respective Churches.

That brings us to the issue of resurrecting the Kyivan Church Study Group and fostering some basic understanding of ecumenical objectives by the rest of us.

The Kyivan Church Study Group was born out of necessity when, after a decade of very positive formal theological dialogue between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches (Patmos and Rhodes, 1980; Munich, 1982; Bari, 1987; New Valaamo, 1988) there was a convergence of events with disturbing consequences. After agreement on various theological and sacramental issues had dispelled long-held misconceptions about how greatly the Orthodox and Catholic Churches differed, the next logical step would have been to turn to the issue of the papacy and its role in any future re-united Christian world. Instead, the dialogue veered completely off course and became completely absorbed by the issue of "uniatism" (in this particular case meaning the existence of Eastern Catholic Churches, their origins and future destiny).

In 1988 the UGCC began to emerge from its catacomb existence in surprising numbers, bringing enormous embarrassment to the Moscow Patriarchate through mass defections of clergy and putting to the lie Russian Orthodox claims that the Ukrainian Greco-Catholics had joyfully self-liquidated their Church in 1946, happily joining the Patriarchate of Moscow. This also caused much consternation for many leading professional ecumenists, both Roman Catholic and Orthodox of various jurisdictions. After all, they had hoped that the thorny issue of the so-called "uniates" had somehow disappeared with the liquidation of the two largest Eastern Catholic Churches (in Ukraine and Romania) after World War II.

At this time the official worldwide Catholic-Orthodox dialogue proclaimed that past union agreements of Orthodox Churches with Rome - especially the Kyivan Church's 1596 Union of Brest - were to be grouped together under one category (no matter how diverse their individual histories were) and to be understood as the unfortunate and unhealthy phenomenon known as "uniatism" (an ill-defined term that has been used to describe everything from a self-romanizing attitude on the part of Eastern Catholics to ecclesiological approaches by which one Church proselytizes members of another).

This "uniatism" posed an insurmountable obstacle that could not be fit into either ecclesial mold - Catholic or Orthodox. All the Eastern Catholic Churches were now described as the result of ill-conceived Roman intrigues to break off portions of Orthodox Churches and submit them to Roman authority. The motive for such unfortunate behavior on the part of Rome was seen as the notion of soteriological exclusivism. Rome, the professional ecumenists agreed, had been acting out of a misguided desire to save some of the Orthodox, since full-scale union was unachievable and the only way to get to heaven, according to Rome's theologians, was to be under the authority of the pope.

Today's ecumenists agreed that such notions were incompatible with current Catholic teaching, exemplified by Vatican II and other official statements, which now saw the Orthodox bodies as "sister churches" in real but somewhat imperfect communion with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church no longer held that the Orthodox, by not submitting to papal authority, were all going to hell. But that raised the inevitable issue: what to do with the Eastern Catholic Churches, who were received into the Catholic Communion precisely to save them from eternal damnation under a now repudiated theology?

This was an issue that needed to be treated by ecumenical dialogue someday, to be sure. Its rising to the forefront at this particular juncture was a serious detour from the business that should have been next on the agenda: how the papacy could fit into a re-united Christianity. The timing of this strange tangent, as noted above, was clearly due to the spectacular resurrection of the UGCC after half a century of brutal persecution. Neither the CIA nor the KGB, neither the Vatican nor Ukrainian Greco-Catholic authorities in the West could have predicted what happened between 1988 and 1992.

Specialists were certain that a remnant of the UGCC had survived. What they did not expect was that the numbers were not in the tens of thousands, but rather in the millions. When over 1,000 priests of the Moscow Patriarchate suddenly identified themselves as having been Ukrainian Greco-Catholics in their hearts all along, the Russian Orthodox Church's Department of External Affairs had to spring into action, screaming bloody murder, accusing the newly decriminalized Ukrainian Greco-Catholics of violence, of stealing churches (which were taken from them by Stalin and given to the Moscow Church, and which the "uniates" very often had built themselves).

Ecumenists quickly jumped into the fray, condemning the long-banned Ukrainian Greco-Catholics without so much as a simple hearing. Representatives of the Vatican and of Moscow held official meetings and set up guidelines with nary a thought of including representatives of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church in the various consultations. It did not take very long for the UGCC to understand what was happening. A new motto appeared among both the hierarchy and the faithful: "Never about us without us!" But getting invited to the table of official Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism was not at all a simple task.

In his paper "The Freising, Ariccia and Balamand Statements: An Analysis" (Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, Vol. 34, 1993, published by the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, St. Paul University, Ottawa), Archimandrite Serge Keleher relates the course of the official dialogue after 1988 and its pivotal conjunction with events in the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church.

As was mentioned above, until the eve of the demise of the Soviet Union, the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, composed of two representatives of each of the "canonical autocephalous Orthodox Churches" and 28 Catholic members chosen directly by Rome, was functioning rather well. The commission was making good progress toward the reconciliation of the Orthodox and Catholic sister Churches, reaching a surprising level of mutual acceptance in the process.

The winds of perestroika were ominous, however. Toward the end of the 1980s the Moscow Patriarchate ventured beyond these official ecumenical discussions and prejudiced the Orthodox world with allegations of criminal violence by Greco-Catholics in Soviet Ukraine, thus winning for Moscow the sympathy of Orthodox communities worldwide. This plan was so effective that in 1989, during Roma Hayda's presidency of the Ukrainian Catholic Patriarchal Society - U.S.A., she felt its effects on the diplomatic corps at the Vatican. When, at the Vatican, the Patriarchal Society's delegations lobbied the ambassadors of the society's respective countries on behalf of freedom of conscience and the Greco-Catholic Church in Soviet Ukraine, questions were raised of whether freedom for the Ukrainian Greco-Catholics might not lead to possible widespread fratricide, escalating even into religious war.

As the Greco-Catholic Church was coming out of the underground, the "uniate" question became more and more central. The Freising Statement of the International Joint Commission for Orthodox-Catholic Dialogue took a strong position against the "uniate" Churches suggesting a type of "final solution" for the Greco-Catholics. They should "freely choose" either Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. (No consideration was given to the possibility of remaining Eastern Catholic, observing Orthodox Tradition while living in full and visible communion with Rome.) This was especially meant for the Greco-Catholics in Soviet Ukraine and Romania. It was offensive indeed.

When, after a 60-year hiatus, all the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic bishops of the world met in Rome that year, they were unofficially faxed the Freising Draft. Considering their situation of over half a century of isolation from each other and, for many, from the outside world, they were not in any position to take on the Freising document.

The "Quadripartite Commission" was another 1990 "ecumenical" endeavor aimed at undermining the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, characterized by disregard for the recently de-criminalized UGCC. Indeed, the commission never allowed itself to use the term "Church" for the Ukrainian Greco-Catholics, substituting instead "communities of Catholics of the Byzantine Rite" with the understood subtext that these communities would be placed under the jurisdiction of Roman (Latin-rite) bishops in an effort to either Romanize them completely or drive them into the Russian Orthodox Church.

In fact, the Church - decriminalized just two months earlier - was saved from such "execution by ecumenism" due only to the resolute action of the UGCC's locum tenens Archbishop Volodymyr Sterniuk, who walked out of the final session of this devious commission, declaring all of its decisions null and void, and without any binding effect upon the UGCC. This frustrated the attempts of professional ecumenists such as those who authored the Freising Declaration to deal conclusively with the "uniates."

Not understanding the agenda of the Joint Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, Ukrainian Catholics and those Ukrainian Orthodox who were not under the Moscow Patriarchate often ignored the commission's activity. Cumulatively, however, the events outlined above unequivocally pressed the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church to enter into ecumenical dialogue. This was not an easy task, given that the official dialogue had by-passed the Ukrainians for decades. In fact, the International Joint Commission actually included one Catholic member who was ethnically Ukrainian, but who was not delegated for this task by the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC, and who identified himself with the Roman Curia rather than the Synod of Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Bishops. The same man had headed the Vatican delegation of the ill-conceived Quadripartite Commission. Thus, if Ukrainian Greco-Catholics demanded representation in the International Joint Commission, they were cynically told that they had it already!

At approximately this time Archimandrite Keleher was associated with Keston College, an Oxford-based center studying religious freedom in totalitarian states. He facilitated the growing friendship of Bishop Basil Losten (UGCC) and Bishop Vsevolod (UOC). Simultaneously, Bishop Kallistos (Ware) [Ecumenical Patriarchate] and the Rev. Dr. Andriy Chirovsky [UGCC] met at a Patristics Conference at Oxford and began discussing the possibility of an ecumenical forum in which Ukrainian Greco-Catholics could meet with representatives of their historic Mother Church, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. From these initial encounters there arose the Kyivan Church Study Group, which brought together bishops and learned theologians from these two constituencies.

The Ukrainian Greco-Catholics chose Constantinople as their interlocutor for good reason. Their ancestors had accepted Christianity from Constantinople in 988, so the link was historically logical. Practically, there was an additional advantage. The autocephalist Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada had recently accepted the "omophorion" (jurisdictional protection) of Constantinople, and there was good reason to believe that the autocephalist Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA might soon follow suit, as it did indeed. Thus, the ecumenical encounter could include both Constantinople and those Ukrainian Orthodox who accepted Constantinople's authority.

From the UGCC the study group included Bishops Losten, Julian Voronovsky and Pavlo Vasylyk, Archimandrites Serge Keleher and Boniface Lyukx, the Rev. Drs. Chirovsky, Peter Galadza, Andrew Onuferko and Myroslav Tataryn, and the then not-yet-ordained Dr. Borys Gudziak and others. From the Ecumenical Patriarchate and affiliated Churches there were Bishops Kallistos, Vsevolod, Archimandrites Ephrem and Andrew Partykevych, Archpriests Oleh Kravchenko and Ihor Kutash, Protopresbyter Emmanuel Clapsis, Father Anthony Ugolnik, Dr. Roman Yereniuk, and others.

Their particular focus was to develop understanding between the UGCC on the one hand and the UOC with its Mother Church of Constantinople, along with those Ukrainian Orthodox who were under Constantinople's jurisdiction. Most interestingly, they were also exploring the possibility of full communion between the UGCC and Constantinople without breaking the existing communion of the UGCC with Rome. That, of course, would place Constantinople in mediate communion with Rome, an admittedly strange situation which, however, is not without notable historical precedent.

Between 1992 and 1995 the Kyivan Church Study Group met seven times in different locations: Oxford (U.K.), Stamford (Conn.) on two occasions, Ottawa (Canada), Halki-Istanbul (Turkey) and Rome and less officially in Chevetogne (Belgium). Members explored the possibility of meeting in Kyiv for further dialogue. Focusing on theology and specifically on ecclesiology (the study of how the Church understands and carries out its mission), the Kyivan Church Study Group made important strides.

The group received the blessing of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Cardinal Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky. The papers from the various consultations were published in the Sheptytsky Institute's scholarly revue, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. The members of the KCS were presented to Pope John Paul II and met extensively with Patriarch Bartholomew, both in Rome and at his residence in the Phanar (Istanbul). Their consultations brought better mutual understanding among all its participants, re-focusing attention on the real issues involved in the often ill-defined and, therefore, uncritically studied phenomenon of "uniatism," or rather, the existence of the Eastern Catholic Churches, their history and the challenges they face in order to become positive players in world-wide ecumenism.

The Kyivan Church Study Group allowed such eminent Orthodox theologians as Bishop Kallistos (Ware) and others to recognize the right of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church to exist, and acknowledged the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox and Greco-Catholic Churches. By raising the issue of double communion (with Rome and Constantinople), the group encouraged Melkite Greek-Catholic ecumenists to raise this issue again in the Church of Antioch. Painfully honest discussions, based on critical scholarship and anchored in prayer and deep Christian respect for persons made all of this possible.

Even though they were not part of the official Joint International Commission, the group's consultations brought them into contact with renowned theologians of the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, some of whom were participating in the official dialogue directly or indirectly as consultants. When the time came to move the dialogue to Ukraine, the difficult situation among the competing Orthodox jurisdictions, along with lack of experience on the part of some participants with the ecumenical process proved too great an obstacle. The work of the Kyivan Church Study Group came to a standstill, though not without regular calls from several members to resume the process.

Unfamiliarity with ecumenism's objectives and its basic working process also prevails in our Greco-Catholic and Orthodox communities outside Ukraine and that, unfortunately, is much to our disadvantage. The goal of ecumenical dialogue is to work toward eventual eucharistic union - communion - of sister Churches, or at the very least to foster better mutual understanding and cooperation. For Catholics, the Second Vatican Council opened the door to understand communion from the perspective of equal dignity of each venerable tradition, hence the notion of sister Churches, a concept unfortunately forgotten by Rome at the time of the late 16th century Union of Brest, when the Vatican was responding to the fragmentation of Western Christianity after the Protestant Reformation with extreme centralization and conformism.

The emphasis on an ecclesiology of communion of sister Churches means that communion is not to be understood as unification by way of submission or the denial of spiritual identity that in the past resulted in the deformations of "uniatism." For the Orthodox this is also an important consideration, because some Orthodox communities also suffered subordination to centralizing powers in the Orthodox world, just as Eastern Catholics found themselves subordinated to the powerful Roman Curia.

The emphasis on communion also means that the union of Churches is not to be understood as a conglomerate as in a corporation in the business world, where one entity is absorbed by another. Neither is it an aggregation of individual units that are unrelated to each other. The Communion of sister Churches is most profoundly expressed in their ability to come to the holy table to celebrate and share the Eucharist while maintaining the spirituality of each Church's particular and holy tradition.

The exploration of shared theology and doctrinal approaches, of the form of governance of each Church, the study of the type of primacy exercised by each patriarch and the redefinition of the primacy of Peter and the role of the Roman pontiff, as well as issues of the territorial and personal jurisdiction of the various sister Churches are just some of the important topics of discussion that can be expected to arise as Orthodox and Catholic sister Churches begin to listen to each other's concerns.

The Ukrainian Greco-Catholic and Orthodox Churches have common roots in St. Volodymyr's acceptance of Christianity in 988 and in 600 years of ensuing common history, but they have drifted apart due to the Kyivan Church's history of oppression by foreign powers, internal division, neglect of each other and isolation from one another. There are many other issues that complicate matters. Internal fragmentation, the burden of unrecognized canonical status of some jurisdictions in the eyes of established Orthodox and Catholic centers, Latinization, Russification, and general loss of historical identity, and the present atmosphere of rebellion and dissent among today's Roman Catholics resulting in a less than cohesive Catholic communion, all present daunting challenges.

Cardinal Husar's visionary "One people of God" address (April 2004) on the return of the headquarters of the UGCC to Kyiv reiterates the openness of his Church to ecumenical dialogue with all Orthodox Churches in Ukraine. The importance he places on communion-based complementarity and on a dialogue of partnership stands in stark contrast to the outright exclusion and ultimatums hurled at them which the Ukrainian Greco-Catholics found so uncharitable in recent times and thus unacceptable.

As it did in the late 1980s, the Moscow Patriarchate once again went outside the ecumenical circle to gather support for its opposition to the Patriarchate of the UGCC, effectively aligning the support of the heads of the world's Orthodox Churches. Many interventions were made by Cardinal Husar with the full support of the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC. Some sporadic ecumenical efforts also were made. But these cannot substitute for the concentrated efforts of a dedicated and well-prepared ecumenical team that is focused for the long term on certain critical issues, working together with Orthodox ecumenists who are also genuinely committed to Christian unity as something that is the very will of the Lord.

Rather than criticize, let us look at an action plan. To make any headway, ecumenism requires a constructive partner. The Church needs a certain amount of order and responds to it well.

For the Kyivan Church Study Group to resume its ecumenical work, Cardinal Husar and the Holy Synod have to call them to action and consider allocating a budget as well. Since the Kyivan Church Study Group's last active period, Ukrainian Orthodox Archbishop Vsevolod, has worked arduously for the communion of Churches with the infrastructure and organizational support of the Orientale Lumen Ecumenical Conferences held annually in Washington and occasionally overseas. He could bring this commitment to the study group once again. During the discussion of the bottom line issues of Catholic-Orthodox dialogue at the June 2004 Orientale Lumen Conference Bishop Kallistos (Ware) pointedly asked for the Kyivan Church Study Group's needed input. We could expect him to renew his own commitment to this ecumenical endeavor as well.

While the Orientale Lumen Conferences seem to have picked up in some measure where the Kyivan Church Study Group left off, they do not address some of the specific problems that have arisen from the very difficult and trying lived experience of the various Orthodox and Catholic branches of the Church of Kyiv. The Orientale Lumen Conferences are by their very nature simply too broad in scope to achieve the kind of depth of study that is required by particular issues facing the Ukrainian Orthodox and Greco-Catholic Churches. Having attended the Orientale Lumen Conferences, many of us have come to respect their forthright approach and the frank but loving atmosphere that is so conducive to dialogue. They have been successful, well-attended by clergy and laity interested in the ecumenical movement, and enjoy the attention of the Vatican and the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The Kyvian Church Study Group was also an informal and unofficial ecumenical assembly, and yet it accomplished much in a relatively short time. The work of the Kyivan Church Study Group ended prematurely (as the spring 2004 experience with the UGCC's Patriarchate has amply demonstrated.) One can only imagine what might possibly have occurred, had the KCSG had a chance to prepare the already positively disposed representatives of the Patriarchate of Constantinople for the idea of the Patriarchate of the UGCC, using their established trusting relationships to explore the best way to present this issue to the Orthodox world. Alas, the KCSG remained unutilized and the Patriarchate remains terribly misunderstood.

Perhaps globalization will drive the future unification of Churches. Perhaps this will be pushed forward by the political priorities of various governments. Neither of these would not serve the real interests of the Ukrainian soul or Churches. One thing is certain: the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic and the three major Ukrainian Orthodox jurisdictions cannot function in continued isolation from each other and from worldwide phenomena like the ecumenical movement. We have to realize that without a team of bishops and theologians dedicated to work in the ecumenical movement, supported by a strong following in our respective Churches, we cannot hope to overcome the current morass.

The Kyivan Church Study Group needs to return to the important work that it began in the early 1990s. We cannot wait any longer.

Father Andriy Chirovsky is the founder of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, St. Paul University, Ottawa, where he holds the Peter and Doris Kule Chair of Eastern Christian Theology and Spirituality. He was a founding member of the original Kyivan Church Study Group.

Roma Hayda has served in various capacities in the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church as a committed lay activist. She has served as national president of the Ukrainian Patriarchal Society - U.S.A., has been active in the international movement of Catholic Laity Pax Romana, and participates regularly in ecumenical conferences, working for Christian unity and a more effective involvement of laypeople in the life of the Church.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, September 12, 2004, No. 37, Vol. LXXII

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