Orthodox Bastion In Greek-Catholic Ukraine

Pochayiv: Orthodox Bastion
In Greek-Catholic Ukraine
UKRAINE
Though post-Communist Ukraine has come together on many fronts, religion remains a sore
spot.
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serving fresh mugs of pilsner, John, an American businessman of Ukrainian descent (a Galician father, a Poltava mother, and a famous soprano aunt from Leopolis), described Kirill’s visit as “full of political implications.”
“You should see Kiev! His effigy is plastered everywhere…” “But he won’t be coming to Leopolis,” he added
hastily. “He has no following here. This city has always
had a story unto itself. Here, the Soviets were in charge
for little more than 40 years...”
President Viktor Yanukovich’s recent failure to acknowledge the country’s Eastern
Echoes of the past
Orthodox faith, appearing instead to favor the Moscow Patriarchate, rekindled lingering
hostilities between the two sides.
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The
history of the religious quarrel is centuries
old and shows no signs of abating.
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text and photos by Massimiliano Di Pasquale
brief but highly charged comment by Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovich reopened the unhealed wounds of the country’s edgy Christian
community. On Jan. 7, 2011, Christmas Day according to
the Julian calendar, Yanukovich announced he was “happy” to see “the entire Orthodox world pay homage to the
Son of God.”
A
But Yanukovich’s remarks contained no mention the
Eastern Orthodox Church, the so-called Uniates. The Uniates, whose followers are widespread in western
Ukraine, remain loyal to the pope of Rome while continuing to use Orthodox liturgy. Uniate religious leaders immediately lodged a protest with the deputy head of the
presidential administration, Hanna Herman, a Uniate follower. But the storm had already been brewing. A few
days before the speech controversy erupted, the city
council of Lviv, a Galician city in the Ukrainian heartland
with strong Greek-Orthodox religious roots, had passed
a resolution condemning a separate presidential omission, namely the dropping of the stanza “Our enemies
will disappear, like dew before the sun/Let us reign united, brothers, over our land…” from the country’s national anthem as sung during New Year’s Eve festivities at the
Nezalezhnosti Maidan in Kiev.
The seeds of a new wave of religious discord were
planted.
On Dec. 7, 1945, the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, AlexRIGHT Protestors in Lutsk demonstrate against the visit
of Russian Patriarch Kirill in 2009. The city is in northwest Ukraine.
BELOW Kirill at the Pochayiv monastery, founded in 1240
by monks fleeing the Mongol hordes who entered Kiev.
Pochayiv: Aug. 3, 2009
re you a reporter? You are following Kirill’s trip?”
“
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The speakers were two young teenaged boys. Seeing me tinker with my notebook and camera outside the walls of the monastery, they confused me with
one of the many journalists accompanying the Patriarch
of Moscow.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church in on a 10day pilgrimage to the Ukraine and is expected here tomorrow.
Two nights ago in Lepolis, in an open-air beer garden
The wooden church of St. George in Drohobych.
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number 35 . april 2011 . 27
ius I, informed Georgy Karpov, the head of the Soviet
committee for religious affairs, of an effort within the
Greek-Catholic dioceses of Western Ukraine to convert to
these churches to the Orthodox creed. “More than 800
priests have already joined the effort,” he wrote, “and in
the end the entire clergy, with the exception of a few diehards, will have done the same.”
Stalin, who during the World War II, had eased pressure on believers to ensure that the Moscow patriarchate
was on his side against the Nazis, resumed his anti-religious policies after the war, deciding to destroy the GreekCatholic church, which he considered an ally of the Vatican and as such a hostile power.
With the complicit assistance of three priests, Gavriil
Kostelnik, Mikhail Melnik and Antoniy Pelveskiy, a was
held in Leopolis to annul decisions taken by the Extraordinary Synod of Brest in 1596, which had established a
link with the Church of Rome.
Despite the illegitimacy of the Leopolis council, attended by only a sixth of the country’s 1,270 priests and no
bishops, the Greek-Catholic Church was officially dissolved and merged into Orthodox patriarchate on March
10, 1946.
The faithful who refused to kowtow to the decision im-
28 . east . europe and asia strategies
mediately became subject to real persecution.
Over the course of three years, between 1946 and 1949,
Uniate bishops were systematically arrested and their duties usurped by emissaries of the Moscow patriarchate
The believers, then about four million, were split into
two camps. A minority began attending Orthodox rite
churches, while the majority continued professing their
faith in secret, and underground religious movement that
lasted 40 years.
Campaign posters
he wheels of the old bus creak through the hills
of Galicia, wailing like creatures in distress. Outside, along the road that connects to Pochayiv to
Dubno, election posters for the 2010 Ukraine presidential race spoil an otherwise pristine rural landscape.
The portly face of Yanukovich, the big loser in the country’s 2004 Orange Revolution, is back in vogue following
T
LEFT The Pecherska Lavra monastery in Kiev
is the country’s oldest Orthodox complex.
CENTER The faithful walk up the stairs
to the Assumption Cathedral of Pochayiv.
RIGHT The rundown bus on the Pochayiv-Kremenets line.
internecine squabbles between President Viktor
Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko
The face is more reassuring more than it did half-adecade ago, largely because the message it sends has been
massaged and reworked. Yanukovich’s seemingly discredited image made a comeback in 2007, helped in part
by American political strategist Paul Manafort (though
Manafort was later dismissed). His Party of Regions reasserted its authority in 2007 parliamentary elections and
Yanukovich served as prime minister for 18 months between 2006 and 2007. In 2009, he announced he’d make
a new bid for the presidency.
Yanukovich’s carefully orchestrated platform praised
the free market, tends a hand to Europe and Russia, and
plays to both democratic rhetoric and patriotism, depending on the level of Ukrainian nationalism. The propaganda message sent in out in the west differs from the
one broadcast in the east, near Donbas and Crimea, where
Russophile sentiment is high.
Before arrival, as the Byzantine domes of the monastery
shimmer in the hilltop distance, the pilgrims on the
crowded bus begin to see posters with Kirill’s whitebearded face. His posters alternate with those of political
figures Yanukovich, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko.
It’s as if the former Metropolitan of Smolensk and
Kaliningrad was also running for president.
Orthodoxy and nationalism
he visit is not just pastoral, but also political,”
“
T
says Father Ihor Yatsyv, special secretary to
Lubomyr Huzar, head of the Greek- Catholic
Church after a July 28 speech made by Kirill in Kiev and
broadcast live.
“Given Kirill’s comments in respect the indivisibility
of Ukraine and Russia,” he adds, “one wonders if the patriarch knows that today’s Ukraine is an independent state.”
Behind Uniate concerns, 5,000 members of the church
gathered in the capital to protest against Kirill’s visit, is a
belief that the patriarch is in the country to do continue
the work of his predecessor Alexis II, namely further a political agenda dictated by the Kremlin.
“After the 2004 defeat,” said John, the American businessman, “Russia will do anything to get back Ukraine.”
Anything, he insists, includes Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev asking the patriarch for help, at least according to Russian media.
The thesis is not all that farfetched among those who
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know Russian history over the past four centuries.
Most historians, for example, believe that the real political power didn’t belong to Tsar Michael I, the first
member of the Romanov dynasty, but to Patriarch Filaret,
who controlled the church at the time.
Former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenistyn, who
before his death in 2008 was a staunch defender of Putin
and his policies, wrote in his 1994 book “The Russian
Question” that the task of rebuilding a greater Russia, including Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, depended on
activist Orthodox Church.
Baroque gold
T
here are stalls selling gold icons, an off-white
building occupied by an army of crows, cars
parked on a slope leading to main entrance of the
30 . east . europe and asia strategies
monetary. Gold baroque domes rear up, grandiloquent in
stature, putting the simplicity of the Galicia’s wooden
churches to shame.
Monks under siege by Mongols who fled Kiev’s
Percherska Lavra founded the Orthodox monastery at
Pochayiv, or Holy Dormition Pochayiv Lavra, in 1240. It
is most striking for its contrasts. Styles and colors overlap, disorienting the senses through what at times seems
like pure kitsch.
Vendors of votive candles and mineral water camp under a red, yellow and blue umbrella, seeking shelter from
the blazing sun. Behind them are the bell tower and
church. The dual image captures the sacred and the pro-
fane, the old and new, the elegant and the tasteless.
Inside, however, the atmosphere changes completely.
Styles abound: Baroque, Rococo and modernism. But
most powerful is the overall aura of deep spirituality.
Tourists represent only a small contingent among the visitors. Most of those present are instead devout pilgrims,
women covered from head-to-toe, praying before the icon
of the Mother of God. They drink healing waters from the
sacred spring or silently contemplate the magic of the
venue.
The anti-papists
une 22, 1941: The start of Ukraine Fascist expan“
The ochre Assumption Cathedral was built
Stalls sell icons and religious souvenirs.
under the guidance of Count Mykola Pototsky.
BELOW A detail of the outdoor altar.
J
sionism.
June 22, 2001: The start of Catholic slavery.”
While Gladiy Mihailo, the then-mayor of Kiev wel-
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comed Pope John Paul II with round bread and salt, ritual gifts bestowed on esteemed visitors by the Ukraine, the
10,000 members Lavra monastery, founded in 1051 by
monks Anthony and Theodosius Berestov, and part of the
Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, gathered to criticize
the pope’s visit (after the independence from Russia in
1991, the Ukrainian church was divided into three parts,
the Moscow Patriarchate, the Patriarchate of Kiev, autocephalous Orthodox Church).
“Catholics have an expansionist design,” said an Orthodox priest from the ancient city of Kievan Rus. “We
came here to pray that God not allow Catholics to divide
Ukraine.”
John Paul II, after a greeting at Kiev’s Boryspil Airport,
issued an ecumenical appeal to Metropolitan Volodymyr
Sabodan, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, who
had urged him to postpone the visit and had refused to
meet him, “As a pilgrim of peace and brotherhood, I am
confident of being welcomed with friendship also by
those who, while not belonging to the Catholic Church,
32 . east . europe and asia strategies
have their hearts open to dialogue and cooperation.”
Volodymyr’s resistance was toughened further by
Moscow Patriarch Alexy II, who had charged the pope
with leading a Vatican “invasion” of Ukraine and complained that his priests had been beaten and his parishioners “hounded” from their churches.
Volodymyr finally responded with an appeal to his
community to refrain from hostile protests or demonstrations for the duration of the pope’s visit. The appeal didn’t stop the protests, but it did prevent them from degenerating into open clashes.
Muscovite stronghold
he complex events that have historically affected
Pochayiv show that the quarrel between Uniate
and Orthodox churches is anything but recent.
After a period under the jurisdiction Greek-Catholic
Church (1713-1831), during which Count Mykola Pototsky built the spectacular ochre-colored Cathedral of the
Assumption (its beautiful interior decorated with images
T
LEFT The main entrance to the Holy Trinity Cathedral,
a modernist structure erected in 1911.
CENTER Pilgrims line the street that leads
to the main entrance of the monastery.
RIGHT Women, their heads covered,
enjoy local pastries after religious ceremonies.
of saints and patriarchs), the monastery was transformed
into a vital center for Russian Orthodox proselytizing on
the fringes of the Catholic Habsburg Empire.
The pretext that saw Pochayiv fall under the aegis of
the Moscow Patriarchate was once again of a political nature, namely allegations that its monks had assisted in the
Polish insurrection of 1830-31.
Orthodox crisis
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ut the biggest rift in the Ukraine’s Christian world
arose during the 2004 battle for the presidency
between Yushchenko and Yanukovich.
While the Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate,
the autocephalous church, and the Greek-Catholic came
together to protest against Russia’s interference in
Ukraine’s political events, seeing Moscow’s meddling as
an effort to impede the development of European-style
democracy and appealing to non-partisan moral civics,
the Moscow Patriarchate, using the words of Andrei Kuraev, a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, assailed Yushchenko as the Antichrist.
Kiev’s tumultuous Orange Revolution, observes University of Rome La Sapienza Professor Oxana Pachlovska, a longtime student of the region, not only produced a
rift between Eastern and Western Christian civilization,
but also opened up a deep rift in the very nature of Slavic identity, giving European and Asian Slavs a different
sense of self and vision.
It’s a profound division, one that the recent controversy between Yanukovich and Greek-Catholics demonstrates as remaining embedded in the cultural and anthropological tissue of modern-day Ukrainian life.
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