Ukraine: Straddling East and West

[Ronald Roberson, C.S.P., is associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C.]

... The very word “Ukraine” originates from a Slavic word meaning “borderland,” and as Samuel P. Huntington pointed out in his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, the country does indeed sit astride one of Europe’s great civilizational boundaries. Huntington notes the existence of opposing Western and Orthodox civilizations, and refers to Ukraine as a “cleft country,” caught between its conflicting cultural and religious ties to Orthodox Russia to the east and Catholic and Protestant nations to the west.

Kievan Rus’, the ninth-century political forerunner of Ukraine, adopted the Byzantine form of Christianity as its state religion with the baptism of the inhabitants of Kiev in the river Dnieper at the behest of Prince Vladimir in 988. After the later division between the Christian East and West, the Ukrainians came to identify with Orthodoxy. But much of Ukraine was occupied from the 14th to 18th centuries by Catholic Poland and Lithuania. In 1596, an agreement called the Union of Brest established unity between the Orthodox Metropolitan Province of Kiev and the Catholic Church. That union was the point of origin of today’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. A long period of religious and political conflict followed, and the union with Rome was gradually suppressed as Russia expanded its control over Ukraine. By the mid-19th century the tsars had eliminated the Greek Catholic Church within the Russian Empire, but it survived in the far western border Ukranian province of Galicia, which had come under Austrian rule in 1772 and passed to Poland at the end of World War I. Galicia became part of Ukraine again only when the Soviet Union annexed it at the beginning of World War II. Joseph Stalin resurrected the old tsarist policy by forcibly suppressing the Greek Catholic Church in its last homeland. He gave its churches to the Orthodox and subjected it to a vicious persecution that ended only with the collapse of the communist government and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991.

This history has left its mark on the modern Ukrainian nation, which is seeking to find its place in relation to Russia and Western Europe. This has not been an easy task, as there are conflicting views about Ukraine’s identity in different regions of the country. The eastern areas are largely Russian-speaking and strongly support close relations with Russia or even absorption into it. As one moves west, more Ukrainian is spoken and there is stronger support for Ukrainian independence and ties to the West. These demographic and political realities are closely paralleled by religious ones. In the east, which is mostly Orthodox, there is strong sentiment in favor of maintaining the links with the Moscow Patriarchate that have existed for centuries. In the west, the Ukrainian Greek Catholics have their ties with Rome, and two recently established non-canonical Orthodox churches have broken relations with the Moscow Patriarchate.

During the 20th century, any loosening of Russian control over Ukraine was accompanied by the formation of an autocephalous (independent) Ukrainian Orthodox church. The first emerged in 1921 during the brief period of Ukrainian independence, only to be suppressed by the Soviets in 1930. The second formed behind German lines in 1942; but as the Soviets pushed back the Nazi armies, the church dissolved and the episcopate went into exile in the United States. In 1990, aware that Ukraine was moving towards independence, the Moscow Patriarchate granted autonomy to its Ukrainian metropolitanate under the name of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (U.O.C.). This did not prevent the head of the church in exile, Patriarch Mstyslav, from traveling to Ukraine in June 1990 to preside over the third emergence of the autocephalous church. But he returned to the United States for reasons of health the following October.

The situation grew more complicated in 1992, when the U.O.C.’s Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) of Kiev was deposed by the Moscow Patriarchate because of his attempts to distance his church further from Moscow. He then joined the autocephalous church and even claimed the title of locum tenens (temporary substitute) in Mstyslav’s absence. This was done without the knowledge of Mstyslav, who broke all ties with Filaret in November 1992. This incident led to the division of the autocephalous movement into two camps: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kiev Patriarchate (U.O.C.K.P.), headed by Filaret, who has been patriarch since 1995, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (U.A.O.C.), which remained faithful to Mstyslav.

Patriarch Mstyslav died in 1993, and his successor, Dimitri, died in February 2000. The U.A.O.C. has not yet elected a new patriarch because it hopes to achieve reconciliation with the other Orthodox churches in Ukraine. Filaret—who is himself a very controversial personality—was formally excommunicated by an assembly of the entire episcopate of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1997. Moreover, neither of the two autocephalous bodies are recognized by any other Orthodox church, and the U.O.C. remains the only canonical Orthodox church in Ukraine.

Overall about 55 percent of the Ukrainian population is Orthodox, but the relative size of the three groupings is a matter of dispute. According to statistics provided by the Ukrainian government in 1999, the U.O.C. had 8,016 parishes and monasteries, while the U.O.C.K.P. had 2,195 and the U.A.O.C. had 1,024. But all opinion polls conducted in Ukraine since 1992 have indicated that the majority of Orthodox believers support the U.O.C.K.P. Both of the non-canonical jurisdictions have a large presence in western Ukraine, where nationalist sentiment is strongest; the U.O.C.K.P. is spread through other areas as well....