When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Ukrainian national and political life began to revive, church architecture, which, according to researcher Stefan Tarasenko, was the highest creative achievement of the people, was dominated by the pseudo-Russian style imposed by the autocracy. “An oppressive dead silence, no movement, the stench of desolation and the putrid decay of corpses,” wrote Vadym Shcherbakivsky in his work *Architecture Among Different Peoples* (1909), describing the time when, from the beginning of the 19th century, the tradition of building in the national style was interrupted on Ukrainian lands under the Russian Empire. In the year this book was published, the prominent historian, considered the father of Ukrainian anthropology and ethnography, Fedir Vovk, traveled through Volyn. The century-long attempts to Russify Volyn led him to this conclusion: “My attention was drawn only to ancient church structures, as the new ones are hardly capable of interesting not only an ethnographer but anyone, due to their gray, formulaic official architecture.”

The Revival of Ukrainian Church Architecture in the Territories of the Russian Empire

At the time when Fedir Vovk and Vadym Shcherbakivsky criticized synodal architecture, a return to Ukrainian forms in architecture had already begun, but it manifested most prominently not in church architecture but in civil construction, as the Church remained an instrument of incorporation and control policies, aimed at Russifying the population and territories. From 1721, the Russian Church was governed not by a patriarch but by a synod under the supervision of a minister who was a tsarist official. Dioceses corresponded to the boundaries of gubernias, and priests received salaries from the state treasury. All higher church positions in Ukraine were held by Russians. The Church was so Russified that in 1919, there was not a single active Orthodox Ukrainian bishop. Architectural projects were approved from above—by the tsar, the synod, or diocesan authorities. There was no room left for folk traditions or national architecture. In some cases, figures of the Russian Orthodox Church of Ukrainian origin preserved their identity and at least once attempted to express it in architecture.

Exceptional examples of the return of Ukrainian elements to church architecture (not counting objects with individual Ukrainian-style details) from the first third of the 19th century to the First World War in territories controlled by the Russian Empire are two churches: one in Pliashivka in Volyn and another in Plishyvets in Poltava region. In Pliashivka, between 1910 and 1914, the memorial Yuriivska Church in the Ukrainian Baroque style was built by architect Volodymyr Maksymov under the supervision of Oleksiy Shchusev. In Plishyvets, thanks to the collaboration of a native of the village, Ukrainian religious figure Bishop Parfeniy Levytsky, historian Dmytro Yavornytsky, and Russian architect Ivan Kuznetsov, a grandiose nine-part stone church was constructed. It was inspired by the Cossack cathedral in Samara (formerly Novoselytsia, Dnipro region), consecrated in 1778. On this occasion, Shcherbakivsky wrote that Ukrainian architecture “is transitioning from wood to stone and developing.”

During the liberation struggles in Kyiv, a Greek Catholic wooden church of the Sacred Heart of Christ was built in Ukrainian forms. Its construction was linked to the presence of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen in Kyiv, initiated by Andriy Sheptytsky. The structure was completed in the spring of 1918 on the site of present-day Volodymyr Vynnychenko Street, 10–12. Between 1917 and the 1920s, this shrine was known as the church of the Sich Riflemen of the Galician-Bukovinian Battalion. It was a three-part, single-domed church covered with shingles, with a pentagonal altar in plan. Above the central section rose an octagonal drum with a pear-shaped dome. Based on photographs, the church had small side arms or wings on either side of the central structure. One of the arms had a pear-shaped finial, similar to the central dome. This church bears some resemblance to the projects of architect Vasyl Nahirny, who designed hundreds of stone and wooden churches, including single-domed wooden churches, cruciform in plan with a faceted altar, rectangular side arms, and a narthex. The building shows some stylization reminiscent of the St. George Church in Drohobych. The Kyiv church of the Sacred Heart of Christ was destroyed by the communists in 1935.

Elements of Ukrainian church architecture were fully expressed in civil construction. This is evidenced, for instance, by the elegant tower on the Boyko House in Kharkiv (1911–1913), built by Serhiy Tymoshenko. The same group includes the house of millionaire Khrennikov (a friend of Yavornytsky) in Dnipro, constructed by architect Petro Fetisov. This house had a facade with three domes in the style of Left-Bank Baroque churches.

At the same time, the Russian Orthodox Church continued to produce formulaic “synodal” churches throughout Ukraine until 1917. In Pochaiv, where the grandiose Trinity Cathedral was built in 1910–1912 according to Oleksiy Shchusev’s design, Russians lacked “a shrine in the style of the Orthodox Russian land.” Furthermore, by the time of the collapse of the Russian Empire, reconstructions in the Russian style had already affected many church buildings constructed before the mid-19th century: from minimal interventions such as the demolition of encircling galleries and covering with oil paints or replacing iconostases, to the addition of bell towers to the narthex, changes in dome shapes, or even the complete demolition of an old church due to “dilapidation” and the construction of a new one. These were built in Russian forms, with old icons or iconostases transferred from the previous church. The scale of church construction and interference with old churches is indicated by figures: in western Ukraine and Belarus — lands taken by Russia from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — the number of Orthodox parishes and churches grew from a few hundred in 1772 to 6,000 parishes, with 9,000 churches and chapels, by 1914. Some churches were built “for growth.” Władysław Reymont wrote in 1910 that in Chełm, the number of churches was impressive, all beautifully equipped and large, but they stood empty, “because there are not enough Orthodox believers to fill even one.”

In 1912, one of the deputies to the Russian Duma from Poland, Stefan Godlewski, summarized: “The task of the Russian state is to Russify everything non-Russian and Orthodoxize everything non-Orthodox.”

Thus, when we now see pseudo-Russian bell towers or domes with kokoshniks added to the narthex or above the central section of wooden or stone churches, exterior walls painted blue, tin roofs, and onion-shaped finials replacing traditional Ukrainian tops; when we see the removal of encircling galleries around wooden churches, altered window shapes, and pediments, these are all consequences of the Russification policy, which have nothing in common with Ukrainian church architecture!

Moreover, the influence of Russian synodal architecture in Ukraine remains so significant that modern Ukrainian church construction still reproduces Russian planning: a high bell tower attached to the central structure, dominating the spatial composition, with churches mostly single-domed. The situation was somewhat better in central Ukraine, where Baroque traditions were very strong. Although the Moscow Patriarchate used these churches, their forms remained Ukrainian. However, recently, the Moscow Patriarchate has increasingly become an instrument for imposing Russian forms in architecture, as it was during the empire. For example, consider the replication of Kizhi architecture in Karelia at the skete of the Sviatohirsk Lavra or the creation of pseudo-Russian churches with exaggerated onion-shaped domes in Kyiv on Brest-Lytovsk Highway and near the Olympic Stadium, which are stylizations of the tented church style typical of Russian architecture and contrary to the Ukrainian tradition of vertical spatial revelation in interiors and upward aspiration.

Initially, Ukrainian Architecture Influenced Russian Architecture

Interestingly, long before the Russian architectural dictate in the territories of the Russian Empire, another architectural “expansionism” was taking place — Ukrainian. After 1654, Ukrainians, particularly graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, began to occupy prominent positions in the church and state hierarchy of the empire.

For example, the ruins of the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross from 1737 in the village of Ukhtoma (now Volgograd Region) remain — a three-part, single-domed church executed in typically Ukrainian forms. A vivid example of Ukrainian style is the architecture of the Trinity Monastery in Tyumen. A graduate of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Filofei Leshchynsky, built a cruciform, five-domed Church of Peter and Paul (1726), a three-part, three-domed Trinity Cathedral (1717), and a two-story refectory Church of the Forty Martyrs (1715).

In Tobolsk, Metropolitan Antoniy (Stakhovsky), also a graduate of the Kyiv Theological Academy, invited Ukrainian master Korniliy Mykhailov from Perevoloka to build the Church of the Epiphany (1737). Thus, Ukrainian architecture spread far beyond the areas of compact Ukrainian settlement. Ukrainian influence left not only architectural monuments but also brought changes to Russian church construction, contributing to phenomena such as “Siberian Baroque.”

Another example: the Pskov Diocese was led exclusively by Ukrainians and graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy throughout the first half of the 18th century. Ukrainian features are noticeable in the architecture of the Pskov-Pechersk Monastery, particularly in the Dormition-Pokrovsky Church, where influences from the churches of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra can be traced.

A remarkable example is the preserved church in the village of Plissa near Nevel in Pskov Region, built in 1747. This is a wooden cruciform church in the style of Baroque churches of Podillia or Left-Bank Ukraine, with a wonderfully preserved Ukrainian-style iconostasis, likely created by visiting craftsmen from Ukraine. At the time of its construction, Plissa was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the church may have belonged to the Uniate Church.

It is a well-known fact that Ukrainian architecture was widespread in southern modern Belarus and from Starodubshchyna to Kuban. Don Cossacks emulated the forms of the Baroque church in Starocherkassk: a church built in Dubivka (now Volgograd Region) in 1796 follows the style of the church from 1706–1719. Similar monuments existed in the so-called Yellow Wedge—areas of compact Ukrainian settlement in the Lower Volga. Ukrainian influence was also evident in civil construction, such as Mazepa’s chambers in the Rylsk District of Kursk Region.

English historian-Slavist David Saunders, who defended his doctoral dissertation at Oxford on the topic of Ukrainian influence on Russian culture, noted that Ukrainians always differed from Russians. Although in the late 18th to early 19th centuries, educated Ukrainians benefited from integration into the broader imperial community, the histories of the two peoples were closely intertwined. Ukrainians supplied Russia with state officials, introduced Russians to the world of Slavic culture, and generally had a higher level of education. However, in the 19th century, the situation began to change: Russians started establishing universities in Ukraine.

For a long time, Ukrainians played a significant role: they shaped the idea of the empire’s Slavic identity, brought their own culture into the public discourse, and their contribution added breadth and depth to imperial culture. But, as Saunders believes, Slavic culture is one thing, and Slavic culture under strict Russian control is another.

The introduction of Sergei Uvarov’s state ideology of “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality” from 1833 effectively ended the coexistence of cultures within the empire. Throughout the 19th century, Ukrainians increasingly thought in terms of separateness and the need to create their own Ukraine, rather than coexistence with the empire. “And Russia, which was neither an eastern nor a western power, began to realize that it could not rely on the south either,” Saunders concludes.

Displacement of Folk Ukrainian Construction with Formulaic Models

Ukrainian researchers of church architecture often cite a decree by Paul I from 1800 banning construction in the Ukrainian style, but no such decree existed; the problem lay elsewhere. Wooden architecture almost disappeared across the entire territory of the Russian Empire in the early 19th century. This may be related to Paul I’s decree of December 25, 1800: “…In all dioceses, if a wooden church burns down, do not allow a new wooden one to be built.”

Furthermore, in 1799, after the death of Kyiv Metropolitan Yerofey Malytsky, a non-Ukrainian, Moldovan Gavriil Banulesko-Bodoni, was appointed as his successor for the first time. After him, all Kyiv metropolitans were Russians. “The foreign metropolitan Gavriil considered his main task to ensure that the Church he led would as quickly as possible become fully aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church and indistinguishable from it,” wrote historian Orest Levytsky in an article on the occasion of the church construction in Plishyvets. He notes that in the early 19th century, three-domed churches of the old Ukrainian type disappeared, replaced by churches with new Great Russian forms and decorative motifs. He writes that while Left-Bank Ukraine lived by its customs and Right-Bank Ukraine was under Poland, communities only sought a blessing from the bishop and then independently found a master and agreed on the plan and appearance of the church. However, over time, Russian decrees began to spread to Ukraine, destroying ancient customs. Levytsky states that this led to the disappearance of parish schools and architecture. Under new laws, any community-used buildings required construction permits, including approval of plans, facades, and sections. Only certified architects could perform the necessary work, which folk craftsmen could not do. Consequently, this matter fell under the competence of diocesan authorities, which had architects at their disposal. Levytsky notes that these architects were not very knowledgeable: although they had no instructions on which style to use, they could only produce projects they had studied in their schools. These were “not artists but officials,” who considered parameters like building capacity, with no desire to work on each wooden church, leading to the implementation of formulaic projects. “Church architecture, which once so passionately inspired old Ukrainian masters, like the famous builder of the Novomoskovsk Cathedral, has long been reduced in our land to the level of a craft performed with bureaucratic indifference,” wrote Levytsky, adding that such projects were equally suitable for both Vyatka and Poltava gubernias: “Task him with designing a church at Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s grave, and he will reproduce the Church of St. Basil for you.” He cites the example of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, where “they demolished a stylish 18th-century refectory church and built a new one in a bizarre style—with a dome of Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia and Suzdal-style onion domes. And who can guarantee that in time they won’t rebuild the largest Lavra church in the likeness of Moscow’s Dormition Cathedral! With our historical ignorance and barbaric disrespect for the past, anything is possible.”

Examples of such policies and ignorance in church construction include the Desiatynna Church, built in 1828–1842 on the foundations of Volodymyr’s Desiatynna Church, with a chaotic mix of styles, and the reconstructions of ancient Ukrainian churches like the Dormition Cathedral of the Zymne Monastery and the Vasylivska Rotunda (12th century) in Volodymyr-Volynskyi.

In fact, the traditions of Ukrainian church architecture continued to be embodied in church architecture in the early 19th century. There was a transitional period. The traditional type of single-domed church remained relevant. For example, in the village of Cherneshchyna in Kharkiv region, architect Petro Yaroslavsky proposed a single-domed church project in 1799. This project survived on paper, allowing researcher Stefan Tarasenko to assert that its composition significantly differed from what was ultimately built, evidently by folk craftsmen.

The folk master who implemented the project preserved the proportions of the central section but altered the width of the altar and narthex according to building traditions. Specifically, he used the proportions of a rectangle where the width equals the apothem of a triangle with a side equal to the rectangle’s length. While the project’s building volume with stylobate and lantern fit into a square, the master violated the principle of cubicity. The height of the central section’s log walls in the interior up to the start of the octagon exceeds the length of the quadrangle’s plan. Instead of a ciborium with columns on the roof, an octagonal light lantern was installed.

In 1801–1804, a pine single-domed church was built in the town of Mena, Chernihiv region, where the central section’s log structure is taller than the side “arms.” Above the first break, the central section’s log walls transition into a proportionally significant octagon, whose width noticeably exceeds its height. It is illuminated by windows placed on the facets oriented to the cardinal directions. The central section is very tall. The altar has a hexagonal plan.

The Pokrovska Church in the settlement of Zemlianky, former Donetsk District, Donetsk Region, built in 1798–1800, had a cruciform plan and a tall main dome with three breaks. A single-domed church in Serhiivka, Udachnenska Village Community, Pokrovsk District, Donetsk Region, built in 1815, had wide “arms” and a later-added bell tower. The destruction of a likely single-domed church with a stone base from the same period was filmed by Dziga Vertov in 1929. The filming of *Symphony of Donbas* took place in Dnipro, Alchevsk, Horlivka, Makiivka, and Lysychansk.

The tradition of three-domed churches continued as well. In the village of Smolianynove, Siverskodonetsk City Community, Luhansk Region, the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin, built in 1803, consisted of three quadrangles, the largest being the nave. The altar and narthex had the same width, but the narthex was longer. A description from 1809 states that the church was made of stone and wood, plastered up to the break, with a roof painted green, domes covered with white tin, and crosses gilded with red gold. According to Tarasenko, this church had a stone base and wooden upper part. He also mentions similar structures in Avdiivka—the St. Michael Church of the 18th century and the two-domed St. Catherine Church in Mariupol from the 1780s.

Among this three-domed type of churches with a stone base, like in Smolianynove, is the Peter and Paul Church in the village of Heorhiivka (now Starohnativka, Volnovakha District, Donetsk Region), built in 1813. It is little studied, with only remnants of the stone base and archival photographs preserved. The church had a massive octagon with fewer breaks. The central dome dominated, while the domes above the altar and narthex were lower. The dome above the narthex served as a bell tower.

Similar projects preserved in archival photographs indicate that there was no sudden disappearance of church construction in Ukrainian traditions under the Russian Empire. It was a gradual process of displacing folk craftsmen with formulaic models provided by diocesan architects. The continuity of Ukrainian traditions in church construction is evidenced by Donetsk region itself!

Even within official church architecture, Ukrainian elements periodically appeared. For example, in the Holy Trinity Cathedral of the Ionynsky Monastery, we see a characteristic dome with a helmet-shaped “Baroque” top. The large wooden Heorhiivska Church in the village of Selyshche, Baryshivka Community, Brovary District, Kyiv Region (1910), is distinguished by Baroque domes, though on a synodal basis. A departure from Russian forms is also noticeable in the church of 1902–1906 in the village of Deptivka, Konotop District, Sumy Region: the vertical revelation of the central section resembles the large Cossack churches of the 18th century.

Intensification of Russification in Architecture

Russification in the architecture of Right-Bank Ukraine became particularly noticeable after the 1830s. Although many Orthodox churches from the first half of the 19th century, built by local nobility for parishioners’ needs, were often executed in the Classical style, particularly in rotunda form, can be noted. Such a church was built in the early 1840s in the village of Svytyaz, Volyn, through the efforts of Count Władysław Branicki’s son Ksawery. The project of this church was based on a traditional three-part scheme, which, under the influence of Classicism, leaned toward a rotunda. Another rotunda church was built in 1839 with neo-Gothic windows in the village of Makiv, Kamianets-Podilskyi District, Khmelnytskyi Region. Its architecture resembled the neo-Gothic palace of Raciborowski nearby. The development of the Northern Black Sea region by tsarist Russia and the growth of southern Ukraine were reflected in the construction of large Classical cathedrals in Odesa, Izmail, Katerynoslav, Mykolaiv, and Kherson. Distinctly Russian elements appeared later.

From the second half of the 19th century, church construction increasingly featured bell towers with tall tented tops, domes with crude onion-shaped false domes or finials, Vladimir-Suzdal brick wall plasticity with kokoshniks, annular arches, weights, and stout columns, and a red-brown color scheme. Sometimes, the reconstruction of old churches seemed absurd. A symbol of thoughtless Russification is the addition of a bell tower in 1888–1890 to the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin (1784) in Rokytnytsia, Kovel region. A church with two towers near the narthex is similar to churches in Mykulychi in Volyn, Novi Mlyny, Berezna in Chernihiv region, and Pereiaslav. The Baroque church in Novi Mlyny was similarly complemented by a later synodal bell tower. The church was destroyed after 1931 but was studied by Tarasenko. Many such examples can be found. The most significant reconstructions affected churches belonging to the Uniate Church in the western territories of the Russian Empire.

Even before the Polotsk Council of 1839, when the Greek Catholic Church was liquidated within the Romanov Empire, except in Chełm, Russian authorities actively erased the Western European appearance of former Uniate churches (even those built before their transition to the Uniate Church). As part of these efforts by the imperial administration, organs were removed, royal gates were installed, illusionistic altars were eliminated, and altar icons reminiscent of Catholic ones were destroyed. In the works of local historian Mykola Teodorovych, known for his historical-statistical description of Volyn settlements, some authentic church elements were labeled “strange,” “Uniate,” or even “icons of Jewish painting.” However, despite deliberate destruction, many ancient relics and traditions were preserved, and Russification did not always proceed unhindered.

A vivid example of Russian interventions in the exterior appearance of architectural ensembles and church interiors is the Pochaiv Lavra, where changes continued from the 1840s to the present day. The interior of the 18th-century Dormition Cathedral remained almost unchanged until the 1840s, as evidenced by Taras Shevchenko’s watercolor from 1846 (left). In 1861, Tsar Alexander II ordered the installation of an iconostasis (right). Works by Luka Dolynsky, created in 1807–1810, were also removed. Later, a tall bell tower was built next to the cathedral, and in 1906–1912, the Trinity Cathedral was constructed.

Teodorovych describes the resistance of Ratne residents: on August 30, 1834, peasants from Vydranytsia near Ratne expelled the priest, removed the curtains from the royal gates, rebuilt the altar, locked the church, and took the keys, loudly cursing the cleric. Similar acts of defiance occurred in other parishes. In the communities of the Resurrection and Illinska churches, parishioners did not allow the royal gates to be closed during the liturgy. One resident even attempted to assault the priest, and only the intervention of Russian captain Sukhotsky prevented the situation from escalating. Analyzing the state of church construction in Volyn in 1887, Pompey Batiushkov reached a conclusion that eloquently confirms the success of the Russification policy: “There is now no place for Ukrainian aspirations to separate this region in any way.”

However, reconstructions took place not only in Russian-controlled Ukraine. In the territories of Maramureș and Ugocha counties (now Transcarpathia), the Uniate Church was established in the first quarter of the 18th century, and church reconstruction began after the visitation of Mukachevo Bishop Manuil Olshavsky in 1751–1752. This reconstruction, according to Roman Mohytych, intensified after the Vienna Council of 1773 and the signing of the so-called Bachynsky-Festevych contract in 1779: the state provided loans for rebuilding old churches and constructing new ones, dictating its architectural requirements. In 1779, three “model” church projects were distributed, and the construction of other types of churches was strictly prohibited. In house-type churches, a framework bell tower, usually false and without bells, became mandatory above the narthex. The towers were topped with a tall spire with four smaller spires at the corners or a Baroque top. In three-domed churches, tented tops were lowered completely or partially and covered with a box vault or topped with steep four-pitched roofs, with a mandatory high framework tower above the narthex.

Churches of the Lemko building school emerged in the second half of the 18th century and developed from the late 18th to the late 19th century. Their appearance was driven by the Uniate clergy’s efforts to align the external appearance of Eastern Rite churches with Roman Catholic ones. The main architectural feature of these churches was the shift of the height dominant from the nave to a tall bell tower integrated above or beside the narthex’s log structure.

A Brief Period of Derussification

Unfortunately, in the 20th century, the revival of Ukrainian church architecture in the Russian Empire was sporadic and more pronounced in Volyn in the 1920s–1930s, when the region became part of Poland. These were the efforts of high-caliber architects whose projects might have been incomprehensible to parishioners accustomed to synodal forms. The most significant efforts toward Ukrainization in architecture were made by Serhiy Tymoshenko, the author of churches in Bronnyky (1928) in Rivne District and Prylutsk (1934) in Lutsk District. The first is a majestic three-domed, three-part church with three breaks, while the second combines Ukrainian Baroque and Functionalism. The same group includes the cruciform Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in the village of Yasynynychi (1937) in Rivne District. Recently, a friend of the author of this article, historian Artur Alioshyn from Lutsk, shared photos of a previously unknown church to art historians in Osmigovychi, Kovel District. The 1939 photographs show a newly built wooden church in the Ukrainian style: a three-part, domeless church, quite common in the region (Mashiv, Zgorany), with a pear-shaped finial in the middle of the gable roof, and the central nave featuring trapezoidal windows characteristic of 18th-century Left-Bank architecture. The photo captures the moment of the consecration of the crosses by the great-grandfather of the author’s daughter. This church has not survived, with only metal crosses remaining. The project could have been designed by Serhiy Tymoshenko or other architects, such as Ukrainian Pylyp Pylypchuk or Tadeusz Krafft, among others.

With Ukraine’s independence in 1991, a wave of church construction and restoration began, reviving sites damaged or repurposed during the Soviet era. Many new churches drew on Ukrainian Baroque traditions, yet Russian colonial legacies persisted. The Moscow Patriarchate’s influence contributed to widespread construction in Russian imperial styles. Rooted in Kyivan Rus, Ukrainian architecture once displayed a rich variety of native forms that were later distorted by Russification and the imposition of synodal templates. This dominance of Russian forms, uncritically accepted by many clergy and church communities, led to their replication in contemporary church design. Pseudo-Russian features such as onion domes and kokoshniks continue to obscure authentic Ukrainian architectural identity. Today, restoring historical monuments requires a conscious choice: preserve colonial alterations or return to the original Ukrainian forms based on solid historical evidence.

Bohdan Voron

While Jesus was in Bethany at the home of Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume and poured it on his head while he sat at the table. But when the disciples saw this, they became irritated and said, “Why this waste? Surely this perfume could’ve been sold for a high price and the money given to the destitute.” But knowing this, Jesus asked them, “Why are you bothering the woman? She has done a beautiful thing for me. You’ll always have the destitute with you, but you’ll not always have me. (Matthew 26:6–11)

What do we mean by Liturgical Aesthetics?

The very term liturgical aesthetics might sound ambiguous. To some, it may appear overly narrow and technical; to others – overly broad and vague. Therefore, before approaching the core of the matter, it is worth sketching some boundaries – not as rigid definitions that constrain thought, but as initial orientations that help clarify the direction of our reflection.

In this context, liturgical does not refer exclusively to the Divine Liturgy, although that remains central. Rather, the term encompasses something broader: the entire liturgical reality in which the People of God collectively experience and express their faith.

Similarly, aesthetics in our discussion is not limited to the language of art history, which investigates the beautiful. We will touch upon its deeper meanings:

• In a philosophical sense – as an attempt to understand sensory perception not as something secondary or subordinate, but as a legitimate path to knowledge in its own right, one that complements – and at times even challenges – a purely rationalist worldview;

• In a theological sense – as the recognition of Beauty not merely as an aesthetic category, but as a profound ontological attribute of God, one through which God is revealed.

Thus, what is at stake are reflections on how the spiritual is mediated and perceived through the material – especially as this takes shape in the Ukrainian context of the Byzantine liturgical tradition.

Since I am not into dogmatic and automatic modes of thinking, I propose a format that privileges inquiry and invites shared creative exploration, rather than dispensing ready-made answers. For this reason, I will share living reflections rather than dry affirmations.

Form and Content

When we reflect on how our faith is expressed in the liturgical dimension, do we pay attention to what dominates our experience: form or content?

The problem is that, in actual church life, these two aspects often become separated. We either reduce everything to ritual perfectionism — where the main priority is not to make any mistakes and to perform everything according to the rubrics, even if this involves incomprehensible archaisms, such as prayers for the tsar before Matins — or, conversely, we simplify everything to the bare minimum, where what remains of the Liturgy is only Communion. And even this not as a shared remembrance of Christ’s event, but as an individual “act of consumption” — enter, queue, swallow, exit. Quick, convenient, efficient. And so it repeats, almost around the clock.

But perhaps the essence does not lie in choosing one and discarding the other? Perhaps true beauty is found in balance? For whenever one side dominates the other, distortion inevitably arises. And it is precisely here that the strength of the Byzantine tradition lies: it demands harmony.

One must admit that the Byzantine tradition is, in fact, quite demanding and impractical. So much is required for the full celebration of a single service — not to mention the sheer number and duration of all those services. Yet not everything in this world is to be measured by efficiency and utility. Pragmatism and rationality are, no doubt, powerful tools — but they are neither the only nor the self-sufficient modes of sober thinking, especially when it comes to realities such as personal relationships and liturgical art. And it is precisely these, I am convinced, that most vividly constitute the spiritual character of Eastern Christianity.

Insightful in this regard are the reflections of Fr. Dr. Yury Avvakumov on the place and role of various forms of art within worship, where he emphasizes their unity and harmonious integration within the liturgical cult. The fact that we now attempt to separate them, treating them as independent external elements that are merely combined in the Liturgy, is, in his words, “our imperfection, the result of a rupture in the original harmony of the cult, a consequence of its modern reconfiguration, reinterpretation, and secularization”¹.

He argues that rite is not merely an outward expression of faith but an essential part of it; and that sacred art is not simply a secondary embellishment, a kind of “aesthetic form of expression²” for important theological ideas, but rather their direct embodiment and making-present. He vividly illustrates his point with metaphors that highlight the interrelation between rite and theology — where the rite is not “a wrapper for a candy,” but rather “a cabbage,” whose very leaves constitute its substance³.

I must note that this line of thought deeply resonates with me, especially when considered in light of the foundational principles of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, chief among which is the relationship between form and content — their essential correspondence and mutual expressiveness. Nearly the entire first volume of his Theological Aesthetics corpus is devoted to elucidating the claim that there is no essence without some form of outward manifestation, and conversely, every manifestation presupposes the presence of an underlying foundation⁴.

In other words, what we perceive (form) always carries within it something more (content). Without this inner essence, the outward appearance would be hollow; and without external expression, the essence would remain invisible and unintelligible. What is most crucial in all of this is how Eternal Beauty — that is, the beauty of God, His glory, His very essence — becomes visible to us through concrete form⁵.

The foundation and guiding reference for this is the Mystery of the Incarnation of Christ. Form does not surpass essence, nor does it obscure it, but it is proportionate to it to the extent necessary for perception to be truly possible. “One who is not illumined by the form will see no light in the content either”⁶ — this is not a threat, but rather an invitation to seek the middle path, both at the level of intellectual apprehension and of sensory experience.

In the same vein, I would like to point out a particular feature of liturgical art — namely, that the distinction between “high” and “applied” art is always inappropriate in this domain. Take, for instance, iconography or liturgical chant. These forms inevitably possess a functional dimension and cannot exist as ends in themselves. And yet their very purpose is of such a nature that it elevates them to the level of the truly sublime in an absolute sense.

What we are speaking of is prayer — communion with God and the knowledge of God — where these artistic forms function as mediators,a kind of wire bridges that help to reveal the divine presence and orient the faithful toward the Archetype. Thus, they become integral to this process. This is not to say, of course, that prayer is impossible without them; but to those for whom a Gnostic worldview is alien, it seems evident that under ordinary circumstances, these artistic mediators play a vital role in the liturgical life and spiritual experience of the Church.

Perhaps this will be especially evident to my fellow artists. The very act of creation is an inseparable part of prayer, an expression of faith by a person who is ecclesially rooted, who lives a spiritual life and maintains deep personal communion with God (though, of course, exceptions exist — but let us focus here on the ideal). When one’s subjective experience, reinterpretation, and expression of a given spiritual reality is shaped by the stream of ecclesial tradition, in accord with Scripture and Tradition, then it necessarily attains objective value. It becomes, in perception, a kind of resonator — amplifying and clarifying the dynamics of synergy, mutual exchange, and self-giving in communal prayer.

Let us be attentive

The question I now invite us to contemplate is this: how often — if ever — during the liturgy do we experience the feeling expressed by the apostles on Mount Tabor: “It is good that we are here!”(Mt 17:4; Mk 9:5; Lk 9:33)? And this is clearly not about mood, fantasy, or self-suggestion, but about the conscious experience of an authentic encounter. A calm and sober sense of reverence, gratitude, belonging, dedication, and awe. It is distinct from an overly emotional, agitated, or even fanatical exaltation.

Yet there is also an opposite extreme — when religious feeling is almost entirely absent or becomes very weak. The first type — emotional hypertrophy — is more often found in rural parishes, where people may engage with religious events in a deeply emotional way. The second type — dullness or loss of religious sensibility — is more typical of urban residents, where the rhythm and environment of city life often contribute to spiritual indifference.

This tendency is particularly characteristic of the modern secularized and pragmatic world, in which many people enter a church as though it were a service center, thinking in transactional terms (in case of more engaged individuals), or as a kind of cultural relic — to pay tribute to tradition or admire a historical monument. In each of these polarized distortions, perception becomes skewed, hindering proper expression — and vice versa. And this concerns the clergy no less than the laity.

I would hope that more communities would incline toward the “golden mean,” yet the very fact that such communities do exist is already a great joy in itself. At the same time — and somewhat paradoxically — it is precisely within such environments that certain new iconoclastic tendencies sometimes emerge. These are often motivated by good intentions: the rational optimization of liturgical life, an effort to make it more accessible, concise, and less burdensome for the modern person. It may also be an attempt to distance oneself as much as possible from Muscovite cultural codes (although it is absurd to equate the Byzantine tradition solely with those codes) and to identify more closely with Western ones.

Such tendencies are increasingly beginning to affect not only the stylistic expression but also the content and manner of performing the liturgy. Some perceive the chanting of stichera and troparia as superfluous; others worry that wall paintings may “distract” from highly spiritual prayer. Perhaps this is true for certain individuals. Yet more often such excessive rationalization merely limits the experience, and instead of a transformative and holistic encounter, the individual is left with a dry, moralistic lecture. Often, a single beautiful poetic sticheron communicates the meaning of a feast far more fully and vividly than another formulaic, prosaic sermon.

The argument in favor of “white walls” in church space deserves particular attention. It is true that in today’s world, visual culture has become dominant and aggressive. But does the elimination of visual elements in the church truly help to focus attention on prayer? It seems that both psychological and spiritual dynamics suggest otherwise. Researchers of the psycho-emotional impact of color claim that an overwhelming presence of white in one’s surroundings overstimulates and irritates the senses, hindering focus and sustained attention⁷.

This is confirmed by empirical experience: for most of us, a large white space may, for a brief moment, evoke a sense of elevation or detachment from the ordinary world. But with prolonged exposure, memory and imagination inevitably become active: instead of unobstructed focus on prayer, we find our attention constantly shifting between various memories, fantasies, concerns, and a mass of informational clutter that accumulates in our minds throughout the day — most of it in the form of images.

From a spiritual perspective, positive engagement is always more effective than negation. Therefore, it is far more fruitful to focus attention with the help of concrete, visible images that direct thoughts and feelings toward God, than by attempting to eliminate entirely any “external distractions.” Moreover, icons by their very nature and purpose are intended to ground rather than “launch into orbit.” This is why preference is given to natural colors and figurative forms.

The icon, like Christianity as a whole, is not about fanciful escapism or distraction from harsh reality. Rather, it is about a conscious, personal turning toward the Incarnate God (or a saint), and standing in truth before Him — in the body, in a specific context, here and now. And this, ultimately, is a foretaste of eternity.

Instead of a Conclusion

The topic of liturgical aesthetics in the contemporary Ukrainian context within the bounds of the Byzantine tradition encompasses a far greater range of aspects and nuances than can be addressed in full. In this article, I have been able to touch on only a few of the most foundational questions and challenges, seeking to remind us why beauty holds such significance for our rite.

Through these reflections on expression and perception, on the relationship between form and content, and on attentiveness to the essential details of authentic liturgical prayer, I hope to inspire and encourage readers toward their own contemplation and search. May discernment and sobriety, attentiveness and wisdom, love and generosity, and the harmonious relationship between theoretical knowledge and lived experience always serve as the guideposts and driving forces of that search.

Olha Subbotina

І. Restoring historical justice. Mission impossible.

In May 2022, I was giving a lecture on the Russian invasion at the Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Leuven. I wanted to convey to the Western audience the unpleasant truth about the war, in which millions of Ukrainians found themselves unexpectedly. After the lecture ended, one of the listeners commented: “Why do you think the Ukrainian position is objective and deserves support? Let’s hear the other side. Perhaps they [the Russians – author] had legitimate reasons to start this war.”

Reflecting on the nature of war and even superficially analyzing the main events from the history of Western civilization, I am now compelled to acknowledge that the noble (at first glance) idea of restoring justice has been the pretext for initiating many armed conflicts and wars. Take, for instance, the Sudetenland crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1938, where under the guise of restoring historical justice, Hitler demanded the annexation of this region to Germany, claiming it was necessary to protect the rights of the Sudeten Germans living there. The Crimean War (1853–1856) began as a dispute over the rights of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Russia presented its invasion of Crimea as a protection of Orthodox Christians, though in reality, it had strategic objectives to expand its influence in the Balkans and control over the Black Sea. Consider also the recent instance of Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson, where the topic of restoring historical justice emerged as a pervasive theme. This was despite Putin’s own display of a particularly “unique” interpretation of historical events.

While appeals to justice are frequently used by states or groups to legitimize military actions, the notion of justice alone doesn’t ensure their legitimacy, primarily for two reasons. Firstly, the perception of justice is inherently subjective, varying widely across different cultural, historical, political, and personal contexts. What may seem just to one party can be perceived as unjust by another. Secondly, leaders or governments might invoke justice as a strategic tool to sway public opinion, justify acts of aggression, or obscure the actual motivations behind a conflict, whether they are strategic, economic, or political in nature.

Attending solely to the narratives of conflicting parties fails to offer a full insight into the situation and should not be the sole basis for conflict resolution. It’s imperative to also consider additional factors, such as the ethical and moral implications of military actions, adherence to international law principles, and the risks to global civilization. The casualties among civilians and the widespread devastation wrought by war necessitate a deeper examination of conflict origins. The value and sanctity of human life, the common good, and responsibility towards future generations are meta-principles that inherently complement the pursuit of peace and justice in the context of the social teachings of the Catholic Church. The pursuit of peace or the desire for justice alone makes the structure of social life unstable and even dangerous, like scaffolding without support.

In this war, Russia, regrettably, exhibits a disregard for principles and a lawlessness that not only overlooks the tenets of international law and the sovereignty of other nations but also neglects the fundamental human rights, including respect for and the intrinsic value of human life.

ІІ. A country of contradictions and paradoxes.

Ivan Karamazov, a character from Dostoevsky’s novel, prophetically declared, ‘If there is no God, everything is permitted.’ The paradox of contemporary Russia is that it possesses a church yet seems to lack God’s presence. The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces starkly symbolizes who (or what) truly reigns as the deity of the Russian state and identifies its devout followers. This situation’s irony deepens as Russia, especially over the past decade and notably in this conflict, positions itself as a guardian of traditional values. It asserts itself as the last authentic refuge for the preservation of eternal metaphysical truths, natural laws, and divine commandments.

The collapse of the Soviet Union marks a pivotal moment that can be interpreted as signaling the close of the modern era on its terrain. Unlike the Western world, where the decisive moment came in the decade following the end of World War II, the countries of the Soviet bloc seemed frozen in the rigid structures of modernity, and the year 1989 marked not only the end of an empire but also the beginning of a redefinition for the countries and peoples who unexpectedly found themselves in a new existential situation. Describing the state of contemporary society with its variability and instability, the rejection of traditional structures and frameworks once considered immutable, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman introduced the term “liquid modernity.” Social structures, identities, and ideologies are no longer stable and predictable, forcing individuals to constantly adapt to changes, requiring flexibility but also leading to feelings of uncertainty and temporariness. Social bonds become more ephemeral, and traditional institutions such as family, class, and nation lose their former stability and influence. Liquid modernity represents an era of new opportunities and anxieties. The changing world is both attractive and repulsive, demanding more responsibility, personal involvement, and the courage to be.

For the former Soviet citizens unaccustomed to freedom, the post-USSR dissolution era was undeniably challenging. In the absence of “solid” societal frameworks, even the notion of truth required reevaluation. Extending Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” to encompass knowledge, information, and truth, I propose the term “liquid truth.” In the fluid landscape of “liquid modernity,” characterized by perpetual flux and instability, “liquid truth” captures a scenario where truth’s objectivity and absoluteness are up for debate. Information is swiftly altered or molded by media influences, ideological variances, and individual convictions. Thus, truth becomes a relative concept, its validity contingent upon the context, the angle of perception, or the agendas of particular groups or entities. Unlike post-truth, “liquid truth” does not signify the end of truth per se but rather points to its fluidity and contextuality, encapsulating the idea that “your truth and mine may differ.”

The Russian state machinery is a complex hybrid, combining the rigidity of a totalitarian system with highly adaptable strategies for navigating the information landscape. Russia skillfully employs a variety of information manipulation tactics to advance its agenda, both domestically and internationally. This includes leveraging state-controlled media for propagandizing to its domestic audience, disseminating disinformation and fabricating news for international observers, and engaging in selective information sharing and factual distortions, epitomized by the notorious denial “there are no [Russian] troops there,” a statement well-known to Ukrainians. The machinery behind this, consisting of bot and troll factories, swiftly shifts focus from one topic to another, promoting Kremlin-endorsed narratives and swaying public opinion across social media platforms.

In “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), Hannah Arendt discusses that totalitarian states are founded on two pillars: terror, which instills fear internally among the populace, and propaganda, aimed at persuading those outside of its immediate control. However, the Russian form of totalitarianism merges these strategies, applying both terror and propaganda across the board without distinguishing between those within the country and those abroad. This approach involves spreading misinformation globally while also making nuclear threats, alongside oppressing Russian citizens through arrest, imprisonment, and even murder, all while bombarding them with false information. This tactic showcases a sophisticated use of both intimidation and misinformation to manipulate and control public perception both domestically and internationally.

Regrettably, the Church is not immune to such manifestations of evil. Being a divine-human institution, it, too, occasionally finds itself ensnared in communication pitfalls.

ІІІ. Leopolding. To reconcile the irreconcilable.

In the late Soviet era, the era of my childhood, there was a popular children’s cartoon about a cat named Leopold and two mice he constantly tried to reconcile at any cost. His catchphrase, “Let’s live in harmony,” resonated as a motto for the entire generation of 1980s kids.

Stepping away from the cartoon’s narrative, I aim to employ Cat Leopold’s figure as a metaphor to explore how a commitment to reconciliation, purely for peace’s sake, can turn out to be not just ineffective but potentially harmful. This concept, which I use here, was introduced by writer and blogger Ostap Ukrainets. He is credited with coining “leopolding,” a term that encapsulates the effort to mediate a conflict between two parties, prioritizing the declaration that conflict does not exist as the foremost, and often the sole, significant action.

Real resolution of conflict situations, elimination of imbalances in the status quo, and addressing the actual causes of conflict entail complex and prolonged efforts that require a deep understanding of the conflict’s essence and acceptance that both sides have fundamental differences in viewpoints. Leopolding, on the other hand, represents a form of peacekeeping whose goal is to end the conflict for the sake of peace, but not to resolve the differences that led to it. The ultimate aim of leopolding is the personal comfort of a third party, for whom the existing conflict is an unpleasant incident that temporarily disrupts their living space.

Any conflicts with complex causes always indicate a fundamental imbalance in perspectives and values, divergence in perception and processing of information, disrupting the status quo and provoking conflict. Addressing real conflicts is difficult also because it not only requires an understanding of the essence of the conflicts but because they can’t always be fixed per se. There are antagonistic positions for which a parity reconciliation is inherently impossible. If such an antagonistic position is a fundamental value for a person, they cannot simply be persuaded to reconcile with an opponent whose views entail or require the non-existence of the antagonist. Ukrainian-Russian relations over the past 20 years (at least since the Orange Revolution of 2004 or even earlier) are an example of precisely such a conflict.

However, Leopold is not concerned with reality, but rather with a facade where everyone coexists peacefully. Thus, Leopolding always involves gaslighting the harmed party, and often, both sides, as conflicts typically affect all parties, albeit in different ways. The less authoritative and more susceptible side is usually coerced into ignoring their own interests and values for the sake of the uninterrupted comfort of a third party, which isn’t involved in the conflict situation at all.

Leopolding is harmful because it’s not a tool for conflict resolution and doesn’t address the underlying causes of the conflict; instead, it allows them to be ignored. Typically, ostentatious distancing from a conflict, where direct involvement could contribute to resolution, only encourages further conflicts. Calls for understanding, devoid of an attempt to grasp the underlying issues and deeper differences that fuel the conflict, do little to resolve it; they simply urge silence. On the other hand, engaging in dialogue aimed at resolving the conflict may lead to uncomfortable politicization of discussions. By accepting the strategy of Leopolding imposed by a third party, dissenting parties are forced to be less themselves, so as not to give the impression that the behavior of one side of the conflict may be morally, ethically, deontologically, or politically ambiguous.

IV. Meeting the Truth in person.

Intuition, which many intellectuals – philosophers, political scientists, and even writers – have been discussing lately, revolves around the idea that politics isn’t a separate realm of society. Instead, it permeates our lives, serving as the foundation for interactions with others. As Alain Badiou puts it: “Machiavelli famously described politics as the art of deception. But for us, it should be something more: society’s capacity to shape its destiny, establish justice, and pursue the common good.” In philosophical terms, politics is about existing in the public sphere. In theological terms, it’s not just about human interests; it’s a space where individuals can uncover deeper truths about themselves, their role in the world, and their obligations to the community and to God. In striving for a better world, politics becomes a calling to serve not only earthly needs but also higher moral and spiritual ideals, illuminating the path to the common good through the lens of eternal truths.

In his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 12:12-27), explaining the nature of the Church, the Apostle Paul uses the metaphor of the body: the Church as the Body of Christ symbolizes the deep unity of believers with Jesus Christ. At the same time, he emphasizes the interdependence of the members of the Church. Just as in a body, no part can exist independently of the others, so too every believer requires community with other members of the Church for spiritual growth and service.

For various reasons, the Church cannot stand aloof from the tragic events unfolding today, but it must be careful not to become entangled in false narratives. I particularly urge caution to avoid finding ourselves in morally ambiguous situations resembling Leopold’s dilemma. Peace and reconciliation lose their meaning when their initial intent lacks sincerity in resolving the conflict. Worse still is when the conflict remains unresolved because its terms demand the annihilation of the other party, not just as a discussion participant but in the literal cessation of their existence.

A compromise is a mutually beneficial agreement where both sides make concessions to achieve a greater good. However, not all compromises are equal, and some may be morally unacceptable or harmful. Philosopher Avishai Margalit calls these “rotten compromises,” which violate fundamental moral principles and values such as justice or human rights. Rotten compromises often result from strong political or social pressure, where parties feel compelled to sacrifice their principles to achieve a greater goal. However, resorting to such compromises ultimately undermines the legitimacy of the negotiating process and harms the foundation of society. “I believe we should be judged more by our compromises than by our ideals and norms. Ideals can tell us something important about who we want to be. But compromises tell us who we are.”

Being willing to compromise with evil aligns us with the Pharisees to whom Jesus spoke, saying, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” (John 8:44). In the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, where innocent lives are at stake, basic human rights are violated, and power is abused, we, as Christians, are called to stand as witnesses to the truth. Our faith teaches us that every person is made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore, we are obligated to defend the dignity of each individual. This means we cannot stand aside when dignity is trampled upon. The peace we seek isn’t just the absence of conflict; it must embody Christian values. False peacemaking, which turns a blind eye to evil and injustice, doesn’t lead to genuine peace but only to temporary and shaky ceasefires that fail to address underlying issues. Pursuing personal (including spiritual) comfort instead of truth is a capitulation to evil. Ignoring breaches of human dignity principles and attempting to reconcile victims and perpetrators is a form of evil akin to the perpetrator’s crime.

The truth of Christ is unveiled to us only in the direct, face-to-face encounter with those who suffer. This truth transcends mere words of faith; it resides in our actions, in our capacity to empathize, support, and assist. By bearing personal witness and extending recognition and support to every individual who has endured the psychological or physical anguish of war, we exemplify the transformative power of Christ’s love, capable of vanquishing even the most formidable forces of totalitarianism and evil.

Defeating the totalitarian monster is only achievable when we personally confront the Other, face to face. It’s not just an external fight but also an internal struggle against our fears, apathy, and the temptation to remain silent in the face of evil. As Christians, we’re called to be beacons of light in the darkness, peacemakers who, nevertheless, do not hesitate to denounce evil and stand on the side of truth.

In these challenging times, our Christian witness calls for courage, wisdom, and unwavering faith. It beckons us to be more than passive bystanders but active participants, dedicated to promoting peace, justice, and love – core tenets of our Christian mission.

Orysya Bila, Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology, Ukrainian Catholic University

This is an expanded text of the speech delivered at the International Conference “New Wine in Old Wineskin: The Need for New Thinking in Catholic Teaching on Just Peace,” February 26-27, 2024, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv.

Orysya Bila, Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy and
Theology, Ukrainian Catholic University

This is an expanded text of the speech delivered at the International Conference “New
Wine in Old Wineskin: The Need for New Thinking in Catholic Teaching on Just
Peace,” February 26-27, 2024, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv.

John Burger, At the Foot of the Cross: Lessons from Ukraine. An interview with Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 2023. ISBN 978-1-63966-027-8. Paperback $21.95 US.

The use of an interview with a prominent churchman in order to explore themes of contemporary religious life is a well-established practice. Italian journalist Vittorio Messori’s published interview with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) was translated from the German manuscript into Italian as Rapporto sulla Fede and into English as The Ratzinger Report, both in 1985. His written interview with Pope John Paul II was published as Varcare la Soglia della Speranza in 1994 and in English as Crossing the Threshold of Hope in the same year. Antoine Arjakovsky’s Conversations with Lubomyr Cardinal Husar: Towards a Post-Confessional Christianity was published in English translation from the French in 2007.

At the Foot of the Cross comprises four interviews by American Catholic journalist John Burger with Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk. Following a foreword by Myroslav Marynovych, an introduction, and a chapter on Kyiv during the 2022 invasion, chapters 2 through 11 are based on in-person interviews conducted in August 2018 in Baltimore, in May 2019 in Ukraine, and in December 2019 in Philadelphia. Chapter 12 draws on a telephone interview with Archbishop Sviatoslav from June 2022.

The interviews deal with a variety of biographical as well as theological and political topics. As a child in Stryi, Sviatoslav Shevchuk had contact with the underground Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Later, like many members of that network, he studied medicine (66, 142-3). This apparently contributed to his view of the church as a source of healing. In fact, the vision of the church as a “field hospital” was invoked early in his pontificate by Pope Francis – whom Sviatoslav had known when the future pope was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina. At that time a bishop for Ukrainians in Buenos Aires, the future head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church was also influenced by Cardinal Bergoglio’s emphasis on the duty of a bishop to serve rather than to be served. This view of episcopal service is particularly fitting in a world where the church is no longer backed by political power, and “the illusion of the Christian state” is a thing of the past. (108-110) Moreover, the down-to-earth Argentine Jesuit reminded the young prelate that reality is always more important than one’s ideas. (145)

At the same time, as a Byzantine-rite Catholic, Sviatoslav did not ignore Eastern theology. He wrote a dissertation on the 20th century Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov, who developed an Eastern Christian anthropology incorporating the insights of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (94-6). This, he notes in the interview, allowed Sviatoslav to compare and contrast Latin and Byzantine views on human nature, sin, and grace. Sviatoslav’s understanding of the Eastern perspective also enriches his view of “synodality” – a much-discussed topic in today’s Roman Catholic Church. As he explains, synodality is perceived differently in the Greek-Catholic Church than it is in the Roman Church (116, 145-6).

There is, indeed, much that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church can contribute to current discussions in the Catholic and broader Christian world. At a time when many Westerners have begun to doubt the value of their own European civilization, Ukrainians are fighting for the principles of that civilization. And Major Archbishop Sviatoslav has no doubt that European civilization is fundamentally Christian. “I believe,” he says, “that there is no Europe without Christian values and there is no European perspective without Christian roots.” Moreover, he believes that it is Ukraine’s special mission to help Europeans rediscover those values — which are, incidentally, the cornerstone of Catholic social teaching.

It is frequently argued, however, that America and Europe, even as they support Ukraine, project trends that corrode Christian values. As John Burger observes, Russia is holding itself out as a bulwark of Christianity and condemning Ukraine as an outpost of Western secularism. In reply, Archbishop Sviatoslav points out that measured by such indicators as Sunday church attendance, or the number of abortions, Russia is more “liberal” than many Western countries, and far more so than Ukraine (184). He does admit, however, that as a new and embattled democracy, Ukraine is like an open wound, prone to infection by various ideological “viruses” (184-5).

Can the Ukrainian state combat those corrosive influences? “I would not believe,” warns Sviatoslav, “that in today’s circumstances, a state, by its paternalistic protection of the Church, is able to foster Christian values.” (184) At the same time, the Church can provide “strong witness of Christian values inside a democratic, open society.” (185) For he believes that every human being is essentially religious, even if unconsciously. As the failure of the Soviet attempt to impose secularization showed, people naturally seek transcendence. Even as it shies away from organized religion, today’s youth is no exception. (186)

True, post-Soviet Ukrainian youth, reacting to Soviet collectivism and its suppression of the free individual, may find the Catholic church’s social teaching about community and the common good difficult to accept. (176-8) Many embrace “extreme individualism” (177). But the experience of the Maidan taught them the importance of community and solidarity, along with individual responsibility and private initiative. (177-8) Freedom, after all, is not just the absence of coercion. In fact, Sviatoslav believes that “we have to educate people to be free.” For inner freedom is a spiritual category, attainable only by truth and God’s grace. (179)

The Russian war against Ukraine is surely providing Ukrainian youth with a hard lesson in the value of freedom. But what can stop this war? Sviatoslav’s experience in the Soviet army has immunized him from illusions about the efficacy of diplomacy in dealing with Russia. (209) He believes that Vladimir Putin is using the invasion as a way to cope with Russia’s internal problems. Their messianistic, nationalistic pathology prompts many humiliated post-Soviet Russians to to try to “make Russia great again” by humiliating others. It is certainly not the fault of Ukraine, NATO, or the United States (210-211).

The interview also touches on the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the USA. Its experience has lessons for the home country. “Perhaps,” muses Sviatoslav, “we discover our weaknesses very often through the diaspora.” (172) Many of those who leave Ukraine exhibit a very low knowledge of their faith. (173) The church in America needs renewal. This also requires opening up to the surrounding culture and society.
“We are a Ukrainian Church, but we are a Church not only for Ukrainians.” (152) Being present in the American intellectual world is essential. Thus, the recent establishment of Eastern Christian studies at the Catholic University of America is a welcome development. (153) At the same time, it must be remembered that the diaspora affects developments in the homeland. (173)

Readers of this journal will be especially interested in the Major Archbishop’s views on the Patriarchate. Although he does not use the patriarchal title, he does not forbid it. In the Byzantine tradition, he notes, patriarchates “are not created but recognized” (162). The late Major Archbishop Lubomyr Husar emphasized the importance of the faithful building up the patriarchate by maturing as a church — by exercising their rights and learning to govern themselves. (162-4)

In response to John Burger’s question about a single patriarchate with the Orthodox, Sviatoslav refers to the 17th-century project of Metropolitans Peter Mohyla and Josyf Veliamyn Rutsky for a joint Orthodox-Uniate patriarchate of Kyiv. (166-7) But before communion can be achieved, the Orthodox must unite among themselves, and find their place in world Orthodoxy. (168-9)

Sviatoslav’s vision of Catholic-Orthodox ecumenism is not, however, centered on structural unification, uniformity, and jurisdiction, but on communion (146-7, 151). And he is well aware that history has made the Orthodox distrustful of Catholic ecumenical initiatives. “We have to witness to the Orthodox that communion with the Holy Father doesn’t mean a submission or loss of identity,” he stresses. “The fullness of Orthodoxy will flourish inside communion with the successor of Peter…. The successor of Peter, with his collaborators in the Roman Curia, [has] to show through the relations toward us how [he] would like to treat the Orthodox, when one day they will restore communion with the successor of Peter.” (150) In the meantime, the laity have taken the lead: “… I have to say that at the grassroots level, simple believers are further ahead in the ecumenical movement than the monastic communities or clergy.” (168)

In his introduction, John Burger recalls that when Fr. Volodymyr Malchyn, then a member of Major Archbishop Sviatoslav’s staff, mentioned the idea of a biography of the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Burger warned him that he should not expect to see a draft of the book before publication, because a public-relations effort on behalf of the Church or its head would lack credibility (17-18). Although the final product was a book-length interview rather than a biography, the journalist evidently adhered to his principles. He asked difficult, probing questions, which remained in the text even when not fully answered. Thus, as Myroslav Marynovych notes in his foreword, the interviewee “bypassed the question about what concerns about the laity in the Church he sees.” Marynovych concludes that perhaps it was better, after all, not to mention the weaknesses of the laity (p. 12, referring to a question and response on pp. 151-2). The point, however, is that Burger did not delete the unanswered question. Similarly, when the interviewer asks Sviatoslav how the Church can teach the Gospel to people who have no interest in religion, the latter admits that he has no simple answer, because the problem is complex (179). In other words, this book is not mere propaganda.

For the church, after all, has no need for propaganda (except in the earlier Latin sense of propagare fidem). Unlike Marxism, Christianity does not pretend to have the answer to every human question. Rather, the church seeks to lead people toward God and the mystery of his truth. This book tells us a lot about how she is doing that.

Andrew Sorokowski

⁸ Andrew Sorokowski is retired from the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as a researcher in the Environment and Natural Resources Division. He is president of the Ukrainian Patriarchal Society in the USA.

Is it inappropriate to write about Ukrainian church affairs in the US in the midst of Ukraine’s desperate struggle to defeat Russian aggression? Not really. It’s not just because our churches both in Ukraine and the diaspora contribute to the war effort, in terms of providing both military chaplains on the front, and material aid for refugees and other war victims (the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, for example, has distributed over eight million dollars in aid). Nor is it only because we must give the lie to Russia’s claims to be fighting a “holy war” against Western godlessness and immorality, personified by a secularized pro-Western Ukraine. It is also because once a just peace is won, Ukraine’s moral as well as material reconstruction will require the participation of religious organizations — not without input from the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the USA (UCC).

But the diaspora religious communities cannot provide effective guidance and support if their own houses are not in order. This is certainly true of the UCC, whose metropolitan archbishop has taken energetic steps to revive the life of his flock in today’s difficult circumstances. 

Those circumstances were already dark before Covid and the war. The statistics are not encouraging. In 1990, the number of US residents of Ukrainian origin was 721,000, and the four eparchies of the Ukrainian Catholic Church totaled a little over 158,000 members. By 2017, when the number of Ukrainian Americans had reached around a million, Ukrainian Catholic membership had dwindled to about 49,000. If in the 1960s, there were perhaps 100,000 Ukrainian Catholics in the Philadelphia Archeparchy, by 2019 there were officially only 10,000 and actually about 7,000. A similar decline is seen in Canada, where in 1990 there were 202,000 Ukrainian Catholics, but in 2017 only about 48,000.

Why do people leave their church? Do they dislike their pastor? Do they disagree with Catholic moral and ethical teachings? Have they joined some other church or religion? Have they lost their faith altogether? Or are their purported reasons, at least in part, a rationalization for more personal motives, stemming from adultery, divorce, or sexual issues? Or is it just plain laziness? After all, being a fully practicing Ukrainian Catholic requires lifelong study (not just childhood catechesis), prayer, fasting, charity, and active participation in a complex ritual. It is not a simple religion. And yet at bottom, it is quite simple.

Finding the causes of disaffiliation (the technical term for leaving the church) was the principal motive behind a recent study of lay attitudes initiated by Immaculate Conception parish of Palatine, Illinois. A deeper motive, no doubt, was the pain of seeing the younger generation leaving the church. Parishioner John Bilos came up with the idea of a wide-ranging survey. An exploratory group was formed comprising Mr. Bilos, the pastor Rev. Mykhailo Kuzma, Dr. Donna Dobrowolsky, Myron Kuropas (a pioneer of Ukrainian immigration studies), Stefko Kuropas, Slawko Pihut, and Lou Zink. Expert consultants including the demographer Dr. Oleh Wolowyna, and opinion survey specialist Jaroslaw Martyniuk, were contacted. A study group was formed consisting of Fr. Andriy Chirovsky, Bishop Bohdan Danylo, Donna Dobrowolsky, and this writer. The group engaged Professor Oksana Mikheieva of the Department of Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University and a team of Ukrainian researchers. U.S. volunteers helped out with logistics.

During the summer of 2019, the research team studied five communities, collecting 922 filled-in questionnaires and conducting 95 in-depth individual interviews. The onset of Covid in early 2020, and the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war two years later, delayed analysis and publication of the results of this research. The final report has been translated into English by Olenka Galadza and will be published by the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in their journal Logos. 

Parish surveys, it is true, are nothing new. But they are normally conducted using questionnaires mailed or distributed to registered parishioners. They do not cover those who have left the church, or who were baptized but never joined a parish. Moreover — and despite guarantees of anonymity — some respondents may be reluctant to voice critical opinions in a survey conducted by church authorities. 

Seeking to fill this gap, in the winter and spring of 2012 Mrs. Roma Hayda and this writer prepared and sent out questionnaires to contacts and organizations of the Ukrainian diaspora in the US, mostly by e-mail. These reached some of the disaffiliated as well as current parishioners. The survey was brief, consisting of twelve multiple-choice questions. We received 221 responses from 17 states and the District of Columbia. In reporting to the community, we acknowledged that this was an amateur effort, and that a proper sociological survey was still needed. 

Seven years later, the need was met. The Palatine study was the first systematic effort by professional sociologists to gauge lay Ukrainian Catholic attitudes in the US. The study was primarily qualitative, because the absence of detailed statistics made a full quantitative study impossible. Such statistics were unavailable because while the US census may ask about ethnic origin, it does not ordinarily collect data on religious affiliation. One must therefore rely on parish statistics and self-identification by interviewees, which does not provide a full picture. We cannot, for example, determine the number of our people who are religious believers but are not registered with any church or parish without contacting all one million Ukrainian Americans. 

Nevertheless, the qualitative research by the UCU sociologists had the virtue of going beyond the parishes to reach individuals who had left the church: a number of the disaffiliated were interviewed or responded to written questionnaires. They provided a variety of reasons for their estrangement from the UCC, which the report conveys through anonymous quotations.

Like any science, sociology is a tool that should be used with an understanding of its limitations as well as its potential. It can tell us about the beliefs, attitudes, and expectations of those within a religious organization as well as outside of it. But numbers and statistics are not everything. Sociology cannot capture the entirety of spiritual experience. It is one thing to describe social attitudes, quite another to identify their causes, and yet another to prescribe remedies. All the same, sociological study can help ensure that the church’s planning and policy are based on verifiable facts.

Disaffiliation and Isolation

It would be a mistake to assume that disaffiliation is peculiar to the UCC. It is a problem for Roman Catholics, for the various Orthodox Churches, and for religious organizations in the West in general. In the US, the decline of “organized religion,” and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, as well as the rise of the “nones” among youth, are well known and documented[1].

The reasons for such trends, however, are elusive. In a recent book, The Time of Empty Churches, the Czech theologian Fr. Tomáš Halík finds the causes of the decline of religiosity among his people not in the usual suspects of “godlessness, materialism, consumerism, and liberalism,” but in “the inability of the majority of the hierarchy and clergy to understand contemporary culture and society[2].” He characterizes contemporary Czech society as not atheistic but “apatheistic,” that is, indifferent. People ask many questions, he notes, but “do not find answers in the Church—and today do not even expect any from her.” In a review of Fr. Halík’s book, Fr. Roman Ostrovs’kyi asks whether the same situation has not already arisen in Ukraine[3]. It probably has arisen in the US. 

One way to try to understand this phenomenon is to look at broad historical trends. Since the eighteenth century, there has been a movement in the West “from status to contract.” Whereas in medieval society, people were born into a status that they could not change, in the modern age their status has become negotiable. The ultimate consequence has been the current notion that we are free to change not only our social or economic status, but our very identities: “you can be anything you want to be” – a billionaire, a rock star, a person of another sex – and you may even demand that the public authorities recognize your preferences. In the religious sphere, this trend appears as a passage from obligatory “cradle Catholicism” to religious affiliation (or disaffiliation) by choice. Given the alternatives of a sometimes difficult, demanding religion like Christianity on the one hand, and agnosticism or atheism combined with a flaccid ideology of “openness, tolerance, diversity, and inclusion” on the other, it is not surprising that many choose the latter. At the same time, those who choose faith do so not out of habit or compulsion, but as a conscious and voluntary choice. They understand that the essence of religion is not a set of dreary obligations and abstract propositions, but a thrilling encounter with the divine.

The epochal change from status to contract has taken place, however, in European societies where Christianity had long ago become an integral part of the culture, so that the very mentality of each nation was deeply and naturally Christian. Even non-practicing or nominal Catholics and Orthodox still thought in Catholic or Orthodox terms. In eastern Ukraine, communist ideology eroded much of this mental landscape. In the US, the Catholic mentality of major immigrant groups gradually ceded to the dominant American Protestant one, even among those who remained practicing Catholics. Today, American Catholicism seems to be splitting into two camps. Some, following the mainline Protestant trajectory, become only nominal believers or secular liberals. A smaller group, attempting to reassert its Catholic identity, becomes self-consciously and affirmatively Catholic, often in an overtly traditionalist mode – all the while unable to divest itself of Protestant and Americanist influence – with incongruous results. What has been lost in both cases, it seems, is the natural, instinctive Christianity of our forebears.

But that is North America. For Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular, less than a third of whose members are in the West, the future seems to lie in the global South: in the Philippines, Mexico, in Africa and Asia. In countries like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Vietnam, persecution only seems to strengthen Christian resistance. Burgeoning African Catholicism is generally more “conservative” (in the sense of resisting politicization and ideological fads) than that of Western Europe and America—perhaps, one is tempted to speculate, because hardship and persecution focus the mind. The Church in the “developed world,” by contrast, is becoming more “liberal” (in the sense of morally permissive and politically leftist) as it declines. Whether this is a case of causation rather than mere correlation is an interesting question. 

Some distinctions, however, should be made. For example, a recent study by the Springtide Research Institute suggests that while young Americans have less faith in religious institutions and are less inclined to participate in “organized religion” than previous generations, many remain “religious”; they just do not affiliate with any particular church or faith[4]. Furthermore, the study shows that since Covid, members of Generation Z tend to be lonely and seek spiritual guidance from trusted mentors—though not the clergy. Thus, as Springtide executive director Prof. Josh Packard points out, the term “disaffiliation” does not provide the whole picture: young people may be abandoning their churches, but they are not necessarily abandoning their personal spiritual quests. There is still the evolutionary need to overcome the impermanence of the self, through contact with the transcendent. In that perspective, the historic offer of salvation provides a clear choice. 

For Ukrainian Catholics, this situation has been complicated by the challenge of inculturation. If Eastern Christianity has been deeply inculturated in Ukraine over the past millennium, here in America it must be inculturated anew. As our diaspora becomes gradually Americanized, our Christianized Ukrainian culture gives way to an American culture that is already in the process of de-Christianization. What is the diaspora church to do? Should it try to salvage a fading Ukrainian Christian culture which, separated from its homeland, will always be somewhat artificial? Or should it find a way to imbue American culture with Eastern Christianity? The former project sounds like a losing proposition. The latter has barely been attempted. But it would be no small task, as the Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States is at least as remote from the East Slavic cultural matrix in which Kyivan Byzantine Christianity developed as it is from continental European culture. 

Since 2020, the public health restrictions occasioned by the Covid pandemic have put a large dent in church attendance. In The Time of Empty Churches, Fr. Tomáš Halík, discussing the effects of Covid, sees the “forced abstinence from the Eucharist” as a “rare manifestation of God’s pedagogy” and “an opportunity to go deep into oneself and ask oneself some fundamental questions[5].” For those with a healthy spiritual appetite, isolation from church rituals, sacraments, and the companionship of the parish community is a particularly harsh ascesis. For others, however, the restrictions serve as an opportunity to stop attending, even after those restrictions are lifted[6].

The elderly isolated, who may never frequent a church lest they catch Covid, RSV, influenza, or some other communicable disease, must rely on live streaming from those parishes that offer it. Perhaps from time to time a roving priest will visit them to hear confession; perhaps someone will come around to distribute communion. Will they receive last rites in their own rite? In a way, their situation resembles that of Greek-Catholics in Ukraine between 1945 and 1990, whose religious participation (unless they were in the small percentage connected with the catacomb church, or attended the few open Latin-rite churches) consisted of listening to services on Vatican Radio.

Sex, Feminism, Gender

Some observers have pointed to the Protestant influence on American Catholicism, evidenced by such alleged Puritan traits as an obsession with sex. But sexuality is central to humanity and its survival. Traditional religions regulate it carefully. In the West, however, the epochal change has been the separation of sex from human reproduction. As the basis of the “sexual revolution” advocated by Wilhelm Reich, this separation was successfully carried out with the aid of contraceptive technologies. Critics have pointed to the consequences: an abandonment of standards (not just practices) of personal morality, a failure of marriage, a breakdown of the family, and the lonely, atomized society of today[7]. Thus, the Church is left tending to the largely predictable (and predicted) psychological traumas of a society that rejected her warnings. For many of us, it is too late to repair the damage. But if there is (or can be) a Byzantine Catholic theology of sex and reproduction, we should know about it. The theologians at the Sheptytsky Institute in Toronto (the only place in North America where such a project can be undertaken) could discover or develop it. The recently created Center for Ukrainian Church Studies, funded by Bishop Emeritus Basil Losten as part of the Institute for the Study of Eastern Christianity at the Catholic University of America, might eventually become a center of theological development as well.

Even though it is important for the Church to develop a deeper understanding of sexuality (or more broadly, Eros), this approach would be inadequate. To merely study the problem is to misunderstand and underestimate it. Following Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich considered religion a delusion masking unfulfilled sexual desire – much as Marx considered it a delusion concealing economic oppression[8]. In Reich’s view, the sexual revolution would expose religion as a kind of “false consciousness.” Sexual liberation would lead to true human happiness. Religion would thus become irrelevant. 

This became the tacit and largely unconscious creed of the 1960s generation in the West. Those who tried to “cling to religion” while participating in the epochal dissolution of “traditional morality” sought to resolve the contradictions between religion (whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) and the “new morality.” Their vain attempts continue today, taking the form of convoluted self-justifications, sometimes supported by theological acrobatics. American Catholics’ defiance of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae became an ongoing crisis not only in sexual ethics, but in the church’s authority. Many straightforward souls simply abandoned the strictures of religion and embraced the new lifestyle. It is they who have set the tone of the last three or four decades in the Western world. Few have been willing to state that the path their society has taken these last sixty years has been mistaken, and to live in opposition to it, at the cost of ridicule and marginalization. Unless they exercise the “Benedict option” (discussed below), those few, cut off from social opportunities to marry and pass their faith on to children, appear headed for extinction. 

Societal changes in attitudes toward sex are inseparable from the second and third waves of feminism. It has been said that if 19th-century capitalists had behaved according to the Christianity they professed, communism would never have arisen. Similarly, one could speculate that had yesterday’s males behaved like Christian gentlemen, feminism might not have been necessary. Perhaps – though a phrase like “Christian gentlemen” is hardly part of the feminist lexicon. In North America, the imbalance between male and female has been real enough (though it has also been observed that it was Protestantism that accentuated the masculine element in the family)[9]. Equal rights and dignity for women remain necessary and attainable goals. But today feminism, like most “isms,” has fallen victim to its own contradictions. Western feminists, while ostensibly asserting their female identity, imitate men in speech, dress, and behavior, even erasing the very differences that distinguish them as women. Some scorn or repress essential traits of femininity such as motherhood. In their zeal for liberty, they elevate the self-violence of abortion (which early feminists considered to be a crime inflicted on women by men unwilling to take the consequences of their actions) to the status of a cherished freedom and even a constitutional right. 

In her study of early Ukrainian feminism, Martha Bohachevsky argued that Ukrainian women developed their own kind of feminism, distinguishable from what was then fashionable in the West[10]. Will they manage to do so now? If they do, can they harmonize it with church teaching? Or will church teaching evolve to accommodate women’s concerns? Will the church incorporate feminism in its social doctrine? Will it reconceptualize the family, or will it reassert the patriarchal family as normative? In any case, if the UCC is to develop a Christian approach to women’s issues rather than simply relying on Latin models, it will have to rely on theologians like those gathered at Canada’s Sheptytsky Institute.

For many Ukrainians, the related issue of “gender” – a term once confined to grammar — has generated more heat than light. There is confusion between gender as a social reality (the subject of “gender studies”) and gender as an ideology. The former is factually demonstrable: historically, male and female social and economic “gender roles” have been somewhat fluid: witness the participation of women in Ukraine’s armed forces). Gender ideology, however, is seen by many as an attempt to override biological male-female distinctions in violation of the natural order. Thus, last year the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations opposed the Istanbul Convention on violence against women[11] because it allegedly smuggled elements of gender ideology into binding law. To some, unfortunately, their opposition only confirmed the stereotype of traditionalist, male-dominated religions supporting wife-beaters and misogynists. 

But the concern was real enough: by accepting the terminology of an ideology, we consciously or unconsciously accept the underlying concepts. It has been argued that by imposing “gender” and other Western ideologies upon developing nations through various international agreements, agencies, and non-governmental organizations, the West is disrupting those nations’ traditional cultures and moral-ethical systems. It does this in part by recruiting local elites (for example, through scholarships and grants) into its economic and political networks. It would be ironic if the West, having freed Ukraine from Russian imperio-colonialism, were to subject this traditionally Christian nation to this kind of “ideological colonization.” It would be even more ironic if our North American diaspora were to become its enablers.

Christian America?

The thought that Americans could be subverting a nation’s Christian culture will seem outlandish to those who think of America as a Christian civilization. While a few decades ago the US was held up as an example of how an advanced industrialized nation can remain highly “religious,” today this is not so clear. Some commentators have observed that its Protestant ethos, which has sustained American character and success (and has colored American Catholicism), has faded, or is morphing into politics. Others argue that the liberalism that lies at the basis of the American political system, and which has always treated religion as a strictly private matter about which the state must remain agnostic, is in effect biased against religion. This is because separating religion (and not just the church) from the state and its public life marginalizes it, making it irrelevant. What, they ask, can justify such discrimination against religion, when any number of philosophies are acceptable in public discourse? 

Some believe, furthermore, that even the best political system is not sustainable without a guiding philosophical or religious idea. Roughly until the 1960s, the US was animated by a generalized Christian ethos, chiefly Protestant but with increasing Catholic participation, culminating in the vague and perhaps superficial idea of the “Judaeo-Christian tradition.” Yet today, in a philosophically pluralist society, where there is no longer an agreed-upon truth or set of values, it may be that an agnostic state—one that excludes religious beliefs and denies the possibility of knowing ultimate truth—is inevitable. 

Of course, we still have the watchword “freedom,” which we proclaim at every opportunity. But as historian Timothy Snyder pointed out in his recent commencement address at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, freedom without a commitment to truth is meaningless[12]. In the absence of a consensus on what truth is, whether it exists at all, or whether it even matters — our commitment to freedom is not sustainable. 

Given the United States’ massive support of Ukraine during this war, and the likely growth of its influence afterwards, this could have troubling implications for that country’s churches. Must we project the moral black hole at the heart of our society onto more traditional cultures? Europe exerts a similar influence. Recently, a Ukrainian academic and feminist confidently predicted that the European Union and related non-governmental organizations would push Ukraine towards their views of gender issues and abortion despite the opposition of Ukrainian churches and religious organizations. That is precisely what Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin repeatedly predict. The Ukrainian churches’ failed attempt to block adoption of the Istanbul Convention, even if ill-advised, may be a harbinger of future conflicts.

* * *

Faith, Apostasy, Evangelization

There is a general stereotype of the poor and uneducated losing their religiosity as they become educated and affluent. This has been challenged by studies showing that the poor are not as religious as was assumed, and that those with the highest incomes and education are actually more religious[13]. It may be that the loss of religiosity is most common among those in the middle, in terms of both income and education. And it is they who make up the bulk of our American diaspora. The semi-educated – that is, most college-educated Americans – have understood enough to reject what parents and church have taught them, but not enough for a deep re-assessment; enough to absorb currently fashionable trends and theories, but not enough to challenge them; enough to pose questions, but not enough to answer them. The college-educated are quick to grasp the latest ideas, theories, and philosophies, but many lack the intellectual equipment for critical analysis – perhaps because their universities have not given them a background in philosophy. Nor are they likely to have any conception of theology. Thus, they lack the intellectual support for whatever remains of their faith. Faith comes from wisdom, not merely knowledge or intelligence. And wisdom, I have observed, is most commonly found among those with the most education, and those with none. The latter draw on common sense and tradition. The former have processed the “received wisdom” and gone beyond it. 

But if that is so, why are there so few religious believers among our intellectuals? This may be because of the academic world’s ideological conformism, which marginalizes original thinkers who can integrate reason and knowledge with faith. Perhaps this is why, with our limited numbers in North America, our diaspora does not have Christian public intellectuals, as do the far more numerous Roman Catholics. True, we do have a Christian intelligentsia in the broad sense (including professionals and entrepreneurs). But we lack lay leaders who could re-imagine and revive religious life.

This was not always so. Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky’s inspiring leadership in inter-war western Ukraine raised a crop of prominent Catholic intellectuals, most of whom emigrated to the West after World War II. Among them were psychologist Wolodymyr Janiw (1908-91), longtime rector of the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, and Bohdan Bociurkiw (1925-98), professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa. In the US, they included professors Leonid Rudnytzky (born 1935) and Miroslav Labunka (1927-2003), both at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Bohdan Lonchyna (1917-85) of Fordham University in New York, and Vasyl Markus (1922-2012) of Loyola University in Chicago. The last three can be regarded as public intellectuals by virtue of their leadership in the Ukrainian Patriarchal movement. Professor Rudnytzky has been prime mover in the St. Sophia Religious Association of Ukrainian Catholics. They have no successors. There is, to be sure, a new generation of Ukrainian-born scholars making academic careers in the US. But none of them appears to have any connection to the Church. The reasons may be obscure, but the phenomenon is striking.

In the absence of lay leaders, the task of evangelization is left to the institutional Church. At the same time, that task appears more difficult than it was a generation or two ago. If Christian America is fading into the past, the Christian West is already history. But perhaps it is not that simple. In his 2022 Erasmus Lecture, Bishop Anthony Fisher of Australia suggested that parts of the “West” are simultaneously post-Christian, Christian, and even pre-Christian. Pointing out that the Church had experienced steep declines in the past, the bishop called for a hopeful and creative evangelization[14]. Results of the Palatine survey suggest that before our church can evangelize the world, however, it needs to evangelize its own people. The Ukrainian Catholic Church in the USA is facing a “fourth wave” many of whom are not as attached to language or church as the third wave and are more inclined to assimilate. Those who have retained a patriotic loyalty to Ukraine, especially after the recent Russian offensive, do not necessarily associate nationality with the Church. True, the fourth wave has filled the pews of some of our emptying churches. But those new members are only a fraction of the whole. And the kind of religiosity they have brought from the village or town, marked by Latin-style devotional practices and emotional pietism, is not likely to survive the pragmatic materialism of American culture, especially among their young. 

Effective evangelization must be carried on not only in space (“to the ends of the earth”), but in time. There are few places on earth that the Christian message has not reached in some form. But Christianization is not a one-time event. The Baptism of Rus’ over a thousand years ago did not make all succeeding generations permanently Christian. True, the Ukrainian village preserved a particular synthesis of pagan and Christian practices, tied to the agricultural calendar, which has survived into modern times. But as soon as our villagers left for the mines and factories of Pennsylvania, Detroit, or the Donbas, or the offices of Kyiv, Lviv or New York, they became detached from that Christian village culture. They became more or less “secular,” even if they maintained an incongruous and ultimately unstable mix of folk Christianity and the mechanical rhythms of modern life. Moreover, in the modern age, each new generation makes its own choice. Thus, if Christianity is to endure, evangelization must be an ongoing process. And since there can no longer be any religious compulsion — indeed, there are strong counter-pressures from culture, society, and sometimes even the state—there is no guarantee of success. Christians believe that the Church will endure to the end of time. But the Church that Christ encounters at the Second Coming may be that of Africa or China. There is no certainty that the Church of North America will still be there.

Too often, churchmen engaged in evangelization seem oblivious of the society around them, and assume that their audience is already committed to the faith. They seem to ignore the fact that for many, neither the church, nor any “organized religion,” has any appeal. The promise that fulfilling the rigorous demands of a complex religion – regular church attendance, fasting and prayer, confession and penance — will save us from sin and death has little appeal to those who don’t believe in sin and accept the permanence of death. One has to start with basics, such as the very idea of the existence of God, of the soul, or of anything that cannot be apprehended by the senses. Nor can we assume that the truth of the Christian message is self-evident. I have known perfectly intelligent people who could make no sense of the New Testament. In a disenchanted age, the merely rational, literal-minded materialist cannot believe in angels, spirits, or miracles even if he wants to. Today’s young person, innocent of any religious upbringing or education, may look at the bewildering array of world philosophies and religions and ask why this particular one should be true. Is our clergy prepared to discuss such matters with skeptics and unbelievers?

At the same time, those who are drawn to religion have a variety of expectations. Some seek what critics call a “therapeutic” church. In today’s stressful times, shaken by war and pandemic, no one can be blamed for seeking a peaceful sanctuary. Even people who eschew formal religion for psychological therapy sometimes return to their religious roots[15]. Others, motivated by a sense of justice and solicitude for the poor, see the Church as a vehicle of social activism. And probably for most of our diaspora, the Ukrainian Church serves as a marker of ethnic identity and a manifestation of nationalism. All these expectations are of course flawed, and sometimes downright mistaken and potentially heretical. They may, it is true, lead some to a fuller and more orthodox faith. But whether they are legitimate approaches to evangelization is another matter. 

Naturally, the prime evangelizers are bishops and priests. The Palatine survey reflected a generally positive impression of our pastors. Today, many are from Ukraine, and those are some of the best and brightest. Many of them, being married with children, have battled the twin monsters of our youth culture and our public school system. But Ukraine needs its priests too, especially now that vocations have begun to drop off, while the war imposes extra burdens. Besides, few non-native Americans can understand American society (which even natives can find perplexing) well enough to evangelize it. Moreover, there is something anomalous about importing priests from a foreign country, even if we share its cultural heritage. Every land, every culture, should produce its own clergy. Perhaps when we find we have no more pastors, it may occur to us to encourage our children to enter that most vital of callings. 

Tent or cult?

There is a discussion among Roman Catholics as to whether the Church should be a broad, inclusive tent (Isaiah 54:2) or a narrow, active elite. There is good scriptural as well as papal authority for the tent model. Early in his pontificate, Pope Francis said it was not enough for the Church to open her doors; she had to go out into the streets and squares and seek guests for the Lord’s banquet[16].

The danger of an inclusive church, however, is that it may no longer be recognizably Catholic. The surrounding society may weaken the community’s moral resilience. Surveys have shown that substantial numbers of Americans who self-identify as Catholic neither practice the faith nor accept its fundamental tenets. Moreover, we are living in a society where even basic norms of civilized life have declined. For example, according to a 2021 survey by the US Centers for Disease Control, nearly 15% of adolescent girls are raped, and 13% attempt suicide[17]. Nihilism is becoming the default philosophy of the young. Shouldn’t the church seal itself off from all that outer darkness?

It can be objected that a small local church risks becoming a sort of cult—a conceptual bubble, a discursive echo-chamber, out of touch not only with society, but with church authority itself. Yet a small church can be strong — if it is concentrated, dedicated, with an active intelligentsia. In an interview with Peter Seewald published in 1997, the late Pope Benedict XVI said that while it was regrettable that people were leaving Christianity, the faith might be in better hands with “small, insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intensive struggle against evil and bring the good into the world that let God in.[18]” In his 2017 book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher proposed that American Christians form compact communities to resist the secularizing trend of the surrounding culture[19].

In the final analysis, however, one cannot plan a broad or narrow Church. The Church must be faithful to Christ; its dimensions are beyond our control. In the case of the UCC, a small and scattered church may well be the inevitable result. We no longer have the compact northeast US communities that produced our church leaders and active laity. Dispersed across the United States, we do not easily coalesce into territorial parishes[20] . The church of the future may exist virtually, in a series of concentric circles with a core of clergy and monastics surrounded by a narrow ring of active, devoted laity and a wide outer circle of committed though less active members, connected only by the internet and meeting physically for confession and communion only where and when circumstances permit.

A related dilemma is whether the UCC should be a Ukrainian church – that is, one serving immigrants in their native language – or an American church using English. Trying to do both places high demands on bishops and priests. The first option is essentially conservative – preserving a patch of Ukraine for newcomers. The second would have to be highly innovative and flexible in order to successfully “translate” our complex church culture into an American cultural idiom.

But if the Ukrainian Catholic Church should evolve into an American church in the Byzantine rite, what would distinguish it from the Ruthenian Church? Very little. After all, the two separate hierarchies of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were created chiefly because the Transcarpathians and the Galicians could not agree on their ethnic identity – not for any theological reason. At the least, they should share seminary facilities, teaching staff, and programs. At the most, they could merge. It is the Kyivan redaction of the Byzantine rite, and not the ethnic or national orientation of its practitioners, that makes our church a valuable element of the Church Universal.

Demography and the Family

Today, the committed Ukrainian Catholic is becoming a lone individual facing a post-Christian society and state where anti-Catholic and anti-religious bias are increasingly acceptable. Can that individual find moral support in a viable church community? The future of such a community depends to a great degree on endogamy among Ukrainian Catholics. This is because the basic unit of the Church is the parish, the basic unit of the parish is the family (though there are of course single members), and the core of the family is the married couple. Endogamy depends to some extent on population density and cohesion. Early Ukrainian immigrants to the US lived in well-knit communities, though assimilation took its toll. The Third Wave gravitated to northern and eastern cities, forming “ghettos.” Furthermore, it was politically motivated to encourage endogamy. Thus, new Ukrainian Catholic families arose to replace the assimilated members of the pre-war immigration. But outside these communities, marriage within one’s ethnic and religious tradition was difficult and rare. In my home parish in San Francisco, the number of people of my generation who regularly attended church could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Hence, in such communities, exogamy was almost universal. Today, geographic dispersal is becoming the rule rather than the exception[21]. The Ukrainian family is a vanishing phenomenon. You may trust in divine providence, but you cannot plan to build a Church upon a statistical improbability.

Moreover, the Third Wave’s compulsion to “marry Ukrainian” put ethnicity, rather than religion, at the center. This, too, may have contributed to church losses. On the other hand, those who put faith at the center of marriage and family often found spouses among Latin-rite Catholics (though finding a Latin-rite Catholic who had not left the Church was not easy). Here again, losses to our church resulted. To expect both ethnic and confessional endogamy is unrealistic. 

Our churches’ losses, however, began much earlier. While western Ukrainian villagers preserved faith, church, and religious culture, the intelligentsia was considerably secularized by the turn of the 20th century, roughly in tandem with western Europe. It is from this intelligentsia that much of the Third Wave is descended.

Today, the Third Wave has practically died out, while its progeny have joined the American mainstream. The Fourth Wave from Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine was only partly churched to begin with; the communist assault on religion was in some ways successful. Fourth Wavers also appear to be more prone to assimilation with an increasingly secular American culture. After all, most of them left Ukraine voluntarily, and few could have been so naïve as to think that their descendants would be Ukrainian in any significant sense. With Ukraine independent, that would be more a personal desideratum than a patriotic imperative. Even in the midst of a war, anxiety about the survival of Ukrainian language and culture is no longer a motive. Adding all these factors to the geographic dispersal noted above, one would expect the Ukrainian church population to have decreased drastically. The above statistics indicate exactly that. 

Despite the above-mentioned exogamy and assimilation, the Church’s pastoral activity posits the Ukrainian Catholic family. This is understandable. For comparison, one can look to the largely successful emphasis by the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) on family values. But they retain a geographic concentration and a strong religious solidarity; moreover, they do not limit marriage to a single ethnic group. In the Ukrainian Catholic Church – apart, perhaps, from a few priestly families — it would be surprising to see a family where parents, children, and grandchildren all actively participated in religious life. Yet our Church’s pastoral approach is based on the family model. 

The general decline of marriage in America further threatens the practicability of that model. One observer estimates a marriage collapse of 86% since 1970. People are marrying later; 40 percent of those who do, divorce; and a growing percentage are not marrying at all. Fewer children are born – and of those, 40 percent lack married parents[22]. We may protest (without evidence) that these phenomena do not affect our people. But we cannot insulate ourselves from the fragmentation all around us. We are captive to the broader trends in Western society. 

As the Ukrainian Catholic family declines, it becomes likely that our typical future parishioner will be the lone believer – or perhaps the “family fanatic” who sneaks off every week to participate in strange rituals at a remote location while the rest of the household engages in wholesome American Sunday morning activities like sleeping in, having brunch, or playing sports. (Whether the family fanatic’s exemplary lifestyle of prayer, fasting, and charity will evangelize friends and relatives—or prompt them to call Social Services–is an open question.) True, the fully churched extended family, and the sole religious practitioner, may be extreme cases. For most people, the reality will be somewhere in between. But I suspect it will tend toward the latter. Pastoral planners should take note. Perhaps their approach, now focused on an institution that belongs to some ideal world, should be broadened to embrace the lone believer. 

That is not to say that the Church should not encourage large, cohesive families. Indeed, Mary Eberstadt argues that the decline of the family is the chief cause of “secularization[23].” Ninety years ago, British historian Christopher Dawson predicted that the demise of the patriarchal family would lead to a weakening of religion and of culture in general[24]. His warning was prescient.

Modernization, Secularization, and Culture

The often-used term “secularization” has several meanings, and is almost too broad to be useful[25]. But secularization in the simple sense of a decline of religiosity in a given population is certainly applicable to Ukrainian Americans. Among immigrants, communism’s subconscious effects — as Fr. Halík notes with regard to the Czechs — are persistent and long-lasting, and they have not spared the Fourth Wave. Atheist education, compounding the Russian Orthodox Church’s scandalous discrediting of religion among Ukrainian intellectuals by its collaboration with the state, has produced a thoroughly secularized intelligentsia. As a result, its transition to Western secularism is smooth and easy. 

Secularization is commonly seen as an aspect of modernization, that is, the inevitable transition to modernity. Modernity, we are told, is necessarily secular. We decry Stalin’s destruction of the Ukrainian Churches, which was part and parcel of his destruction of Ukrainian culture — and through artificial famine, of the Ukrainian village and traditional way of life. But it can be argued that this was all a part of modernization, and that what was objectionable was the method, not the goal. After all, modern capitalism has been equally effective in eradicating distinct national cultures (East European radio stations, for example, now play little besides American pop, or imitations thereof). Agribusiness can be faulted for the disappearance of the Ukrainian village and its traditional way of life. Isn’t capitalist modernity destroying religion too – not by a direct assault, as did communism, but by simply ignoring it or deeming it irrelevant – arguably a more effective method? 

The assumption that modernization necessarily means secularization, however, has been challenged. There is no inevitability in history, and there is no such thing as a single line of “progress.” Societies can take the wrong path, and have done so repeatedly (note today’s Russia). If we have taken the wrong path of modernization, we can start anew. As Charles Taylor and others have argued, there can be an alternative modernity — one that embraces the religious. But it has to be created – and that, obviously, requires creativity.

Yet how can we deal with a modernity that explicitly rejects both religion and church? Fr. Tomaš Hálik advocates Pope Benedict XVI’s solution: “education and intellectual dialogue with an agnostic society.” The Czech theologian calls for a transformed Christianity, including “a profoundly contemplated faith, open, incarnated in the culture of our society, conceptualized in dialogue with philosophy, science, and art,” which values the dialogue of faith and doubt[26]. Dialogue is pointless, however, if the parties do not agree on the purpose of the dialogue. If the Christian side intends to win over the agnostic side to its position, the latter may not be interested — unless the Christian side is correspondingly willing to be persuaded of the truth of agnosticism. Dialogue only makes sense if both sides are open to an unanticipated change in their views. On the other hand, Christian engagement with philosophy, science, and culture can enrich all parties and permit them to better define their positions without threatening their basic postulates. As for doubt – is it not the inescapable shadow of faith? Today, the fact that the Ukrainian Catholic archeparchy of Philadelphia is headed by a Harvard Ph.D in History bodes well for the Church’s engagement with the “agnostic” world of science, scholarship, and the arts.  

For many years, that kind of church engagement with the secular world was lacking. Some two decades ago, a leading Ukrainian American scholar criticized the Catholic Church’s “self-marginalization,” a result of its “paternalistic control and anathematization.” Disputing the common narrative that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has “always” been with the people, he pointed to its nineteenth-century legacy of “clericalism, loyalism, and obscurantism.” At the same time, he lamented the intelligentsia’s resulting anti-clericalism (in both eastern and western Ukraine) and “the one-sidedness that it introduced into Ukrainian cultural and intellectual life, a certain atrophy of the genuinely spiritual and religious[27].” Indeed, one may ask how many contemporary Ukrainian writers have engaged seriously with religion. In Eastern Ukraine, the fact that religious life was largely the domain of an alien church, beholden to a repressive state since the eighteenth century, has (with a few notable exceptions) stunted and distorted the spiritual development of our intelligentsia.

Yet it is culture that may offer the most promising prospects for spiritual revival, in America as well as in Ukraine. Here, however, the institutional Church (bishops and clergy) cannot work alone. They can, finances permitting, commission churches, icons and iconostases. But culture is chiefly a task for the laity. This means not only contributing to the culture of the church, but – perhaps more important – projecting the faith of the church onto the surrounding society by means of the arts.

This means involving artists both within our community and outside of it. Outsiders sometimes have a better appreciation and understanding of our tradition than we do. The Greek Americans offer an example. For the design of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox church at the World Trade Center site in New York, they commissioned the renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The result, consecrated and opened in 2022, is aesthetically pleasing and indisputably modern as well as faithful to the Greek Byzantine tradition. It is not a triumphalistic “statement,” but a modestly graceful structure that humbly invites everyone – not just the Greek immigrant looking for familiar cultural markers – to enter and pray. 

Some claim that our Kyivan Byzantine ritual, with its choral singing, pageantry, icons and incense, draws new converts. No doubt it does. But it leaves others cold. For one thing, we, the laity, need to improve our church music. This involves two tasks. The first is to ensure that we have well-directed choirs sing at every major service as a complement to congregational singing. The second is to perfect our choral repertory. This means using good modern church music (Roman Hurko and Valentyn Silvestrov come to mind) as well as classics like Vedel, Berezovsky, and Bortniansky. What we should not do is repeat the mistake of many Latin-rite Catholic music directors who, in a well-intentioned but wrongheaded misapplication of Vatican II, have been catering for half a century to their parishioners’ undemanding tastes with soothing pseudo-pop, instead of drawing on half a millennium of magnificent music from Palestrina to Poulenc – or offering something truly new and edgy.

We should also look beyond the church to the “secular” culture that nevertheless points towards God. One promising avenue is literature—not just Ukrainian-language literature “in exile,” but English-language literature in the Ukrainian tradition. (If that seems like a strange proposition, consider how W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, writing in English, contributed to Irish culture.) In the United States, Jewish-American prose frequently draws on religious tradition. As far as I know, the small corpus of Ukrainian-American writing does so but rarely. Poetry is particularly well suited for spiritual themes. Serious poetry cannot avoid them, and the best verse of even a secularized culture touches on the religious, at least obliquely, if only to question or protest. Recently, California state Poet Laureate Dana Gioia called for a renewal of religious poetry, using fresh language in place of well-worn theological phraseology[28]. He has also advocated poetry in the church, such as new translations of the Psalms. Those texts are familiar to us from the Byzantine liturgy – perhaps so familiar that we ignore them. They have long inspired poets, among them Taras Shevchenko. Yet today, the world of our Church and the world of our literature seem to be galaxies apart. 

This is less true of painting. Worldwide, there is in fact a good deal of contemporary art on spiritual themes[29]. What about Ukrainian painting? One wonders what would have happened if in his final years, the baptized Greek-Catholic Andy Warhol had gained the attention of the Ukrainian Catholics living just several blocks away in New York’s East Village. Might it have sparked a revolution in our art? Fortunately, there has been a renaissance of icon-painting in Ukraine. Lviv’s Icon Art gallery, and the school of iconography associated with it, have attracted the attention of American art curator Mary Elizabeth Podles[30]. One would expect, of course, that the Church, as in the past, would support contemporary religious art through moral, if not financial, support. Such an engagement with contemporary culture would surely contribute to a revival of our church life.

That is not to say that culture should be simply exploited as an evangelical tool. But because a healthy, well-developed culture inevitably contains a spiritual element, it has often had an evangelizing effect. 

Conclusion

The above reflections are based on personal experience, observation, discussion, and a variety of sources, including the report of the Ukrainian Catholic University’s study of five Ukrainian American communities[31]. Naturally, others may reach different conclusions.

Today, religious believers inhabit a mental universe that sets them apart from the contemporary world. In the Soviet Union, this might have landed them in a psychiatric prison. Like the Ukrainian patriots, with whom they overlapped, the Greek-Catholic faithful formed a kind of invisible alternative society. In the relatively free and tolerant USA, religious believers are similarly forming an alternative culture, though they have not suffered systematic persecution. The Ukrainian Catholic Church is one of its many components. Together with other religious believers, its faithful can challenge — and perhaps transform — the greater secular world.

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[1] I am indebted to Mr. Thomas Storck for his illuminating comments on the Roman Catholic Church in the USA as well as on other matters treated in this paper.  

[2] A Ukrainian translation, Chas porozhnikh khramiv, was recently published by Svichado in Lviv and reviewed by Fr. Dr. Roman Ostrovs’kyi in Patriyarkhat, “‘Chas Porozhnikh Khramiv’ ta ‘Zhyttia bez Boha,’” Patriyarkhat, no. 5 (September-October 2022), pp. 35-39.

[3] Id., 36.

[4] Charles C. Camosy, “Study Shows Younger People Lack Faith in Religious Institutions,” Crux, February 17, 2021. https://cruxnow.com/interviews/2021/02/study-shows-younger-people-lack-faith-in-religious-institutions

[5] Ostrovs’kyi, p. 35.

[6] Bob Smietana, “More Americans Stay Away from Church as Pandemic Nears Year Three, Religion News Service, January 5, 2023. More Americans stay away from church as pandemic nears year three (religionnews.com)

[7] Anthony Esolen, “Marriage Fading,” Touchstone, January-February 2023, p. 33. These phenomena seem to vindicate Christopher Dawson’s prediction of far-reaching consequences of a breakdown of the patriarchal family for religion and culture. Christopher Dawson, “The Patriarchal Family in History,” in Dynamics of World History, London 1956, pp. 156-66, reproduced in https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=860

[8] Carlo Lancellotti, “Sexual Colonization,” Touchstone, January-February 2023, pp. 43-48.

[9] Dawson, op. cit. If Dawson was right, complaints about male dominance would be better addressed to Protestant influence on Catholicism than to the Catholic tradition itself, which accords women a stronger family and social role, as reflected in civil law as well as history.

[10] Marta Bohachevsky, Feminists despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884-1939 (1988), published in Ukrainian as Білим по білому (2018).

[11] Signed by Ukraine in 2011, ratified by Parliament on June 20, 2022, and signed by President Zelensky on June 21, 2022.

[12] Timothy Snyder, “Freedom Is To Do the Right Thing,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsMwO5NeQgE

[13] Mary Eberstadt, “Secularization Revisited: Why There’s Hope for Faith,” National Review, December 15, 2022, citing sociological studies from the US and abroad.

[14] Anthony Fisher, “The West: Post- or Pre-Christian?” First Things, February 2023.

[15] Thus, two of the three protagonists in the recent novel The Last Workshop (by Chris Chouteau, Richard Balaban, and Julie Bowden, 2022), which describes group therapy at California’s famed Esalen Institute, draw on their respective Jewish and Christian traditions.

[16] See his interview in La Civiltà Cattolica, September 19, 2013.

[17] Donna St. George, “Teen Girls ‘Engulfed’ in Violence and Trauma,” Washington Post, February 13, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/02/13/teen-girls-violence-trauma-pandemic-cdc/?=undefined&utm_campaign=wp_for_you&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_personalizedforyou&utm_content=readinghistory__position7

[18] Published as Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium (1997).

[19] Rod Dreher, “Benedict Option FAQ,” The American Conservative, October 6, 2015. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/benedict-option-faq/ The title, which refers to St. Benedict of Nursia, founder of Western monasticism, is taken from the conclusion of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1984 book After Virtue. For Ukrainian Catholics, the Rule of St. Basil, though intended for monastics, could serve as a source of guiding principles for such communities.

[20] For statistics on dispersal, see Oleh Wolowyna, Atlas of Ukrainians in the United States, 2019.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Esolen, “Marriage Fading,” 33. “If we want to fill our churches,” writes Esolen, “we must, in the order of nature, form the human beings who will fill them.” Those human beings would be capable of a full life, love, marriage and family. Id., 36. Current trends point in the opposite direction.

[23] Eberstadt, op. cit.

[24] Dawson, op. cit.

[25] I discuss secularization and modernization in “Sekuliaryzatsia: diahnoz i likuvannia,” Patriyarkhat, No. 6 (439), 2013. http://www.patriyarkhat.org.ua/statti-zhurnalu/sekulyaryzatsiya-diahnoz-i-likuvannya/

[26] Ostrovs’kyi, op. cit., pp. 36, 37.

[27] George Grabowicz, Introduction, Harvard Ukrainian Studies vol. 26, no. 1-4 (2002-2003) (“Ukrainian Church History”), 15-16.

[28] Dana Gioia, “Christianity and Poetry,” First Things, August 2022.

[29] For examples, see any issue of the Seattle-based journal Image.

[30] Mary Elizabeth Podles, “Ivanka Demchuk’s Icon of the Annunciation,” Touchstone, January-February 2023, p. 62.

[31] The report of the UCU study is published in English translation in the latest issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, Vol. 63, obtainable from the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, University of St. Michael’s College, 81 St. Mary Street, Toronto Ontario M5S1J4 Canada.

“Youth is not lost – it is boosted. “[1] When I first heard this phrase, I thought that it was definitely coined not by young people. Because only looking from the perspective of the older generation, who are already a bit lost in our language and values, can the idea of lost youth and the idea of calling our experience “cranked up” arise. I could never call the pain which I experienced and which became the background of my current life, with a slang word, moreover – a word of Russian origin. If we compare their younger years with ours, it might seem this is true, but the Ukrainian youth in my environment look at their lives from a slightly different angle. Therefore, I invite you to read my thoughts, thoughts of a girl who is living the equator of her youth during the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Now I will say a terrible thing: in my 25, I have attended my friends’ funerals more often than their weddings. We have a youth that differs from the youth of our parents, a life different from the life of our friends in peaceful countries. And perhaps through their prism it looks like a lost youth. But we have so many things we have to think about, that we are not pondering much over our youth as such.

Today’s youth is in a constant search. We are asking ourselves: why do we believe in God? Shall we will meet later our brothers and brides who gave their lives for our freedom? And this increases the meaningfulness of our prayers and of our faith. We are asking questions, we are looking for our own format, and it’s not about being “boosted.” Youth now is about the search for meaning and about a culture of thinking.

A new paradigm has opened up before us, or rather, we are creating it ourselves. This is probably where the idea of lost youth came from. Yes, in our free time, we weave camouflage nets, assemble first aid kits, and when we meet with friends, we remember the fallen and imagine how wonderful it would be to walk the streets of Lviv with them at least once more. Yes, we will no longer have the fullness of happiness at weddings, because the thought of someone missing from the celebration will always haunt us. But youth has not disappeared.

If we have lost something, it is carelessness. At some point, a curtain woven from illusions about this world fell down in front of us. The curtain, which was supposed to descent slowly, throughout our life spans, is already lying on the stage, and there is no point in lifting it up, because we already know what is behind it. We have faced death, injustice, hatred, violence, cruelty. It happened very abruptly and painfully. However, our youth remains, it’s just that now we have more experience – the experience that we should not have had at all at such a young age.

We often joke with my girl-friends, but everyone really feels it, that we are like old maids compared to our European friends. During my mission with the Heart’s House in Italy[2], I really had a hard time finding a common language with my peers, which had never happened before. I remember one moment: March 2022, we were sitting on the seashore, the sun was setting, there was incredible beauty around, I was surrounded by young Italians talking about some nonsense, about how the pandemic had ruined their lives (ha ha). And at that moment, I just felt like I was going crazy, because my phone was teeming with a completely different reality: the latest news about the POWs, about Bucha, about hell on earth. And no one else around me knows about it and doesn’t want to know, because they have joy as their background, and we have a background of sadness.

It’s strange, but at the same time, I didn’t envy them, I didn’t envy their frankly boring conversations about celebrities or their badly plucked eyebrows. I realized that this pain made me feel something bigger, something greater, something more genuine. It was only when I returned to Ukraine, sitting at memorial services, visiting the graves of my friends, that I began to understand what I had been feeling at that time in Italy. Only by coming to know death can one know life. Realizing that all this will end sooner or later, you start acting now, you stop wasting time on nonsense, you really enjoy the time spent with your friends, because this may be our last meeting. You feel the value of every day, enjoy the sun as if it were shining for the last time, ask yourself what is really important, what God has prepared me for, and why I am still here.

People turn to God when they realize that death is near: in case of incurable diseases or in old age. And we are already here, we are close to death, it has surrounded us from all sides. And we are looking for God in an “accelerated version” of search. Young people are beginning to realize that it is easier to believe in God, easier to understand that He sees further and He has his plan. Those young people who have come to know Him in such pain live it all very deeply and consciously. Old people don’t have much time left for such reflections, and we still have a whole life ahead of us. And we need to somehow live through this pain, give something to someone and trust someone.

So, yes, if youth means living in a world of illusions and nonchalance, then we have lost it. But for me, youth is about the fullness of life, energy and strength. And when, if not now, in the midst of the war, can we experience this?

We can turn what is happening to us into something that will become our strength, not our weakness. It is important how we are living this experience. I chose for myself the following direction – my brother died for me, so I now live for him. This does not mean that I repeat his path or copy his actions. I try to live my life in such a way that it contains at least a little bit of Artem’s thirst for adventure, learning new things, life for the sake of life, and not material enrichment or other incomprehensible whims of our time. This is what gives me strength: the thought that every day someone gives up their beautiful lives for me. Each new death engraves in me the truth that everything will be only as much good as much effort I take.

Sometimes I like to think that we are special. Today’s youth is the most talented generation of all generations because they have been living Ukrainian life for at least 30 years, which no other generation has had before. These are young people who have shown their faith in such great values as freedom, identity, democracy, and the free world with their own blood. They were able to do this in symphony with many countries of the world. For a thousand years, no one could do this. Moreover, our generation has become the subject of this movement. We are the generation that will go through all this themselves and give impetus to the development of the Ukrainian nation – a free, democratic nation with moral and religious values that will be useful not only for our country but for the whole world. This is the fruit of many individuals in the Ukrainian world who have been fighting for these values for centuries with no guarantee or prospect of winning from that fight. And we are the generation that has a perspective, and because of that, we represent a great power.

Since I was six years old, I have been a member of the National Scout Organization of Ukraine, Plast. My identity, my mission, and my understanding of the country I live in and the enemies that exist were minted there.

“When we grow up big, / Brave soldiers, / We will defend Ukraine / From the enemy’s hand”

these are the words from the hymn of the Plast novices (6-12 years old), which I sang every week for six years. And then, in the youth unit (12-18 years old), I took a Plast vow with the words:

“Work and failures, all poverty and misfortune

I will accept as a task of the Great Game,

I will fight with life as with labor in the field,

I’ll carefully bypass treacherous ravines.

And with my wings I’ll fly under the clouds

And quickly examine all my land,

I will measure the thorny paths of Ukraine,

I will lead my country to happiness.

You must admit that when you put such lines in your head, it is difficult to suddenly lose faith or allow yourself not to appreciate what you have. My generation was raised on the stories of grandmothers who survived concentration camps and prisons, as well as life in the worldview underground. Having been trained in Plast, the Leadership Academy, Mohylianka[3], and Ukrainian Catholic University, and now having gained our own experience of war, we simply cannot give up. We are well aware that after the Victory, we will have a lifelong journey to rebuild the Ukraine our ancestors dreamed of. The only thing scary is to live in a peaceful world with our pain.

The human race is capable of surviving many trials. And tribulation does not mean the end of life or its diminution. God gave humans such power that they can, through tribulation, bring new hope and new life to others. And this is what we are experiencing now.

In the book by Rev Andriy Zelinsky “Semen’s Stars,” which I strongly recommend to everyone, I was struck by the following phrase: “Do not be afraid of big dreams. They are like luxurious sails that will carry you through life.” This is what I sincerely wish to all readers – to learn to dream again, no matter what age you are, no matter what horrors you have experienced. Let your dreams become an action that will help make every day worth living.

[1] The slogan of the video dedicated to the International Youth Day in 2022, produced by the network of youth spaces TORI! and UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund in Ukraine.

[2] In 1990 – Fr. Thierry de Roussy founded the international Catholic charity movement “Houses of the Heart” to provide compassion and comfort to the poor, lonely, sick, and disadvantaged, with special care for children. In 2000 the Church recognizes the “Houses of the Heart” as a private congregation of the faithful.  In 2005 the movement receives consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. In 2013 – there are 35 communities in 23 countries, 176 volunteers of 20 nationalities. The Heart House offers young people a missionary volunteer service that lasts from 14 months to 2 years in one of 23 countries on 5 continents.

[3] Kyiv Mohyla University. Together with the Ukrainian Catholic University, considered the two most progressive universities in Ukraine.

Translated by Halyna Pastushuk

This article is dedicated to defining of, and explaining the origins of a new term which has started to be used in nowadays social and political science – rashism. References made to different historical sources clearly prove that the genocide policies themselves did not just jump out of nowhere in 2022, but do have a methodological an ideological root lasting for at least a century. The Chekists (NKVD/KDB people) tortured and murdered Banderivtsi (followers of Stepan Bandera), OUNivsti (members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists)’to punish them for anti-Semitic terror’, thus, at the same time, mass burial sites of Jews with the evidence of the same tortures were discovered. Weird, one would say. But, for the rashits there is nothing strange, or wrong, in presenting their victims as aggressors.

Today the civilized world is shocked by what is going on in Ukraine. No one can remain indifferent to the atrocities against people – no matter civilians or soldiers – and barbarism against cultural values, which mark the very Ukrainian identity.Recently, a new term emerged: rashism. It deals with an ideology based on Russian Nazism, imposed on the people by their authorities by means of propaganda, mass outlook, and numerous crimes against humanity based on them.However, is this combination of ideology, outlook and crimes really new for the political entity named ‘Russia’? Let’s try to figure it out. Perhaps the answer to this question will become a basis for tectonic shifts in the international community’s awareness of what really is history of Ukraine in the 20th century and, in general, of its meaning for European or even world one.

‘First of all, they set up a torture chamber…’

Let’s start with what is happening today in front of our eyes. Rashist crimes against humanity are now being thoroughly documented, although not all of them get covered by media. From that insignificant part of crime descriptions, which has already gone public, a terrifying picture is pieced together, and a human mind refuses to perceive it.

The purpose of the atrocities is to intimidate (to make the population stay away from certain actions and to force the people to testify falsely against others) or to physically eliminate (those who do not surrender to terror or those identified as “extremely dangerous Nazis”). However, very often atrocities are committed for no actual reason at all – as if just for fun.

Shootings of civilians – in the streets, in lines for bread, in vehicles on the road and in their own homes, finishing off the wounded – have become a general practice. Pits filled with human bodies in several layers were discovered in towns and villages liberated from the Russians. Mass burial sites and even dead bodies were laid with mines. Torture took place everywhere. Representatives of the National Police, Ministry of Interior and Security Service of Ukraine, who investigated these crimes, said that Russian soldiers, having occupied the territory, first set up a torture chamber. If the city was large, there might be several prisons.

Several raschits used to break into one’s home to take him/her to prison and ‘to the basement’. Three to five people came to pick up just one. Usually, a bag was put on the victim’s head, and the hands were wrapped with tape. Public Radio Correspondent Oleksandr Khomenko published a testimony of three tortured people from the Kharkiv region – Oleksandr V., Oleksandr Teslenko and Vitaly Ilchenko. Everyone was ‘taken’ from their homes in their home clothes by a large number of soldiers, literally dozens of them. Huge vehicles like “Urals” and “Tigers” were engaged.

A clearly hidden purpose

According to the testimonies of people who survived torture chambers in Kyiv region, as well as in Kharkiv, Kherson and Donetsk regions, they were tortured with electric wires applied to each and every part of their bodies. This torture was considered the “mildest”. However, it was diversified. For example, the Russians put a bag on a victim’s head, or moisturized the place of torture.

The time of torture varied. According to a testimony of one of the prisoners in the Kupyansk camp, during the first interrogation he had underwent electricity torture for 40 minutes. Usually, for such tortures, a military field telephone called ’tapik’, was used.

Sometimes rashist executioners burned crosses with red-hot iron on the bodies of their victims. Ribs and jaws of prisoners were broken, ears and genitals were cut off, sculls were broken or heads got cut off… Perhaps, such actions were also carried out with the same axe with traces of blood that was found by the police in a torture chamber in the liberated town of Izyum. Also, about fifty bodies were discovered in a mass burial site. Local authorities said that almost all of them had evidence of violent death.

The BBC website published a testimony of 67-year-old Mykhailo Ivanovych, who survived torture in Izyum. He was tortured with electrodes attached to his fingers, beaten, and long needles were stuck under the skin on his back. The man was bleeding and was already half dead when the Ukrainian Army entered the city. According to the testimonies of other Izyum prisoners, the Rashists tortured them in complete darkness, shining their headlamps into the prisoners’ eyes.

In a torture chamber located in the village of Pisky-Radkivtsi, in order to ‘get their testimonies’, the people were buried alive (then dug up), and gas masks with a smoldering rag inside were put to their faces. A box full of broken dentures and a dildo were discovered, as well. In the Vovchansk torture chamber, the police revealed, in addition to electric wires, shackles of different types. According to the testimony of the tortured, their fingers were broken and their nails were torn out.

One just cannot help thinking: this is how they try to destroy the very human soul.

 Missiles Aiming Graves

Obliteration of universities, schools, museums, and monuments is not considered a crime against humanity. But it sheds light on the ideology of the Rashists. The answer to the question ‘Why?’, which lies on the surface, is as follows: they destroy Ukrainian markers of identity in order to replace it with their own. However, what can be the answer to the question: ‘Why the churches, belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate, and the synagogues are being blown up?’.

Since the beginning of full-scale war in Ukraine, almost one hundred and fifty Orthodox churches have been destroyed. Let us keep in mind that in the East of the country, where hostilities are taking place, the parishioners of the Moscow Patriarchate prevail.

Synagogues, cemeteries and places of memory of Ukrainian Jews are also damaged. We started with Babi Yar in Kyiv, where the Nazis shot about 50,000 Jews in 1941. The memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was hit by a rocket attack on March 1, 2022. Five people died on the spot. True, this shelling can be ‘attributed’ to the fact that they hit the TV tower located nearby.

However, on March 26, a rashist missile hit another memorial to the victims of the Holocaust – in Drobytskyi Yar in Kharkiv. Another missile exploded near the Kharkiv synagogue, where more than 100 people were present at the time. The roof of the building was destroyed. Synagogues were destroyed in Mariupol in the Donetsk region and Gulyaipol in the Zaporizhzhia region.

In Kyiv, both Jewish and Christian burials were affected by a missile explosion at the Berkovets cemetery. The Jewish cemetery in Hlukhiv, Sumy region, was hit by rioters on May 8, the day of the capitulation of Nazi Germany. By the way, the victims of the Jewish pogrom committed by the Bolsheviks on March 7-8, 1918 are buried there. Two tzaddiks are buried in this cemetery, one of whom was a victim of this pogrom.

On August 8, the Armed Forces of Ukraine shot down a rashist missile over Uman, Cherkasy region, which, according to presumptions, was aimed at one of the most famous Hasidic shrines – the grave of Tsaddik Rabi Nahman. At that time, there were five hundred Hasidim from different countries of the world staying in Uman.

Later on, the rashists ‘vindicated’ the launch by the fact that the Uman synagogue, they say, houses an ammunition depot and a ‘Nazi gathering point.’ And on the day of Rosh Hashanah, the Rashists directed Iranian Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to Uman (the incident was reported by Babel Publications, referring to the SBU sources).

How can the demolition of Jewish shrines be connected with the attack of the Rashists on Ukraine and their further ‘plans to conquer the world’?

A Century of Experience

First, let’s recall the crimes of the Russian invaders on the territory of Ukraine in the 20th century, meaning the atrocities of the Russian army, which in January 1918 occupied Kyiv, robbed and shot the population, leaving behind thousands of dead bodies and millions of terrorized civilians. Penalty for resistance in Ukrainian towns should not be forgotten: every tenth male resident was executed. Let us also mention the spot murders of Ukrainian geniuses as a manifestation of terror – composer Mykola Leontovych, the author of legendary Shchedryk, ‘Carroll of the Bells’, impressionist artist Oleksandr Murashko, plant breeder Levko Simyrenko and many others.

Then there was the Holodomor of 1932-33, which had finally subordinated Ukraine to Russia, and the Great Terror, which began in Ukraine not in 1937 like in the rest of the USSR, but in 1934.

In the report on repression among Ukrainian educators, published in 1935 in the book “On the Front of Culture”, figures are given about the ‘liquidation’ of all directors of Ukrainian pedagogical (then teacher) institutes in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. 229 employees of the People’s Commissariat of Education were eliminated. The ashes of 100 percent of the employees of the regional and 98 percent of the district education departments remained in the prison ‘cemeteries without graves’.

Very little was known about these crimes until the end of the 1980s. In the sub-Russian part of Ukraine after 1923, the special services of the state with its center in Moscow tortured and shot people secretly in the basements, dead bodies were buried at night in the forests pits. Witnesses were eliminated or intimidated: they could pay with their lives for disclosing this information.

The atrocities and executions in the prisons of Western Ukraine, which were committed by the Russian occupation administration before retreating in the summer of 1941, received much more publicity.

Priests and rabbis, public figures, members of parties (including the Communist Party of Western Ukraine), officers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Polish Army, ‘kurkuls’, intellectuals were kept in numerous prisons in almost every Ukrainian town.

Political prisoners were executed throughout the territory of Ukraine, but people in Galicia reacted much more actively to what was done, because it has been only two years since they had been deprived of freedom of speech, the right to public life and private property.

In addition, the Russians then retreated so hurriedly under the offensive of the Nazis that they did not have time to hide the evidence of their crimes – to burn or bury the dead bodies somewhere in the forest. The mutilated bodies were either left in the firing chambers and in prison yards, or were hastily buried right there in pits, sprinkled with lime.

Due to the fact that relatives and loved ones were able to get through the gates of these “secret institutions” a few days after the crime was committed, it was still possible to identify the bodies and record evidence of torture.

Pits and wells

According to the memories of eyewitnesses, in the prison in Sambor, Lviv region, “there were old men, women and children lying shot dead in the rooms and corridors… Each of these corpses had their hands tied behind their backs with barbed wire, their mouths full of finely chopped glass or rags, broken arms, legs and ribs, ears cut off, eyes gouged out.” The terrible picture was the same in town of Drohobych. The townspeople who came to the prison yard on July 1-2 to identify their loved ones were horrified: some had their lips, ears or noses cut off.

“The lower jaws of many prisoners were disemboweled (actually missing), the skeletons showed broken tibias and large femurs, as if they had been fractured. Some of the skulls were cut open with a saw, and some of them were broken with an unknown household object,” recalled forensic medical expert Volodymyr Ilnytskyi.

After the collapse of the USSR, NKVD/KGB buildings in every town of Ukraine began to reveal the secrets of their basements, yards and “special security zones” in the nearby forests. For example, in the Nativity Monastery in Zhovkva, Lviv region, where the NKVD garrison was located since 1939, the remains of tortured people were found under the floor of the cells. ‘Memorial’ Organization, engaged in searching for the victims of repressions and mass burial sites, examined 225 corpses, almost one third of them babies, even fetuses. A large part of the skulls are split from the front, apparently by an ax blow…

In the forest near the village of Posichchya in Ivano-Frankivsk region, people discovered a pit with a mass burial. There, according to a legend, students of the seminary were shot dead. The searchers from ‘Memorial’ Organization found the remains of 32 people and the priest’s clothes, in which the bloody head was wrapped. An ax was found nearby. Forensic examination confirmed that the head was cut off with it.

Some mass graves were uncovered by the Nazis during the Second World War in order to strengthen their propaganda among the local population.

This was the case, in particular, in Bykivnia, Kyi region, and Vinnytsia. The Germans uncovered the mass graves of the victims of the Russians in several cities of Donetsk region. Historian, coordinator of the Eastern Ukrainian Historical and Local History Association, Oleksandr Dobrovolskyi told about this in one of the interviews. So, in Stalino (that’s what Donetsk was called then), the hospital and its staff were shot, and 15-17-year-old students of the FZU (plant professional school) were killed near Makiivka.

In 1989, students of the Donetsk University confirmed the information from 1941 by conducting excavations at the site of mass executions. The layer of human bodies was about two meters, and the clothes on the corpses did not fade. There were Red Army soldiers with medical fixation units on their hands or feet, a nurse with a beautiful blond braid, boys from the professional school. Medical equipment was also found in the firing pit. In Slovyansk, in the basement of NKVD building, they found piles of corpses covered with firewood. Then they discovered a sewage collector clogged with the bodies of prisoners.

The Buried Truth

 The invaders blocked the dissemination of information about their crimes by bribery and terror, sometimes by physically eliminating witnesses. Because of this “iron wall” of propaganda, for a very long time the world had perceived Russia as a highly cultured liberator of peoples, and Ukraine as a part of Russia – a poor, dark and wild land full of ‘sick fascists’.

“Calling others fascists while being a fascist is Putin’s main practice,” writes the famous historian Timothy Snyder.

However, is this actually Putin’s practice? After all, he did not invent all these tortures and the wicked ‘ways’ of presenting a victim as an aggressor. It is likely that the term ‘rashism’ introduced today refers to a much older concept.

Propaganda of the ‘crimes of the Petlyurivtsi, Banderivtsi, Ounivites, and UPA’ had to be very powerful in order to cover up the scraps of information about the atrocities committed by the Rashists that leaked through the heavy gates of the NKVD. Hundreds of books, including children’s books, thousands of articles, ‘documentaries’ and movies made in the USSR were supposed to constantly fuel hatred towards ‘nationalists’ who dared to declare an independent Ukraine.

Rashists still write about the ‘atrocities of Bandera’ – wells filled with the bodies of babies, five-pointed stars burned or carved on the chests of Komsomol members or communists. Although the facts prove otherwise: on many bodies raised from the pits and basements of the NKVD, Ukrainian tridents were cut or burned…

Priest and publicist from Russia Yakov Krotov (at a time a parishioner of Father Aleksandr Men, who was murdered in Russia), who joined the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2020, emphasizes that the lie about the ‘anti-Semitism of the followers of Bandera’ was invented too late. It began to be spread after the Chekists killed Stepan Bandera to justify this mass murder as retribution for ‘atrocities against the Jews’.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

Before eliminating the victims, the Rashists have to dehumanize them. “The ones in front of you are not humans…”. In fact, the Rashists dehumanize whomever they target for termination, in an interesting way – they attribute their own numerous crimes to the victim.

Let’s consider a few concepts from the well-known book ‘Bezbatchenko’ by the participant of the “struggle with the Bandera underground resistance”, and later the head of the 4th Department of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, colonel of state security Kliment Galskyi (code name – Klym Dmytruk). It was printed in Lviv in 1974, with a circulation of 100,000 copies.

The abstract says that the book will reveal the truth about the participation of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists in the preparation of Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR. Especially about the fact that ‘the hierarchs of the Uniate and Autocephalous churches played a shameful role in this despicable case’. Looking ahead, one could admit that powerful Soviet propaganda against Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi, a prominent personality, Head of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (who saved Jews during the Second World War) was built on these views, both internal and external.

In the chapter ‘Terror in Galicia and Volyn’ the concept is built around ‘monstrous massacres of civilians committed by Ounivets groups and their kulak assistants’ against civilians – Ukrainians, Poles, Jews.

Literally: “They organized Jewish pogroms, tortured people, gouged out the eyes of the old and young, robbed property… Trying to intimidate and terrorize the population, the Ounivets werewolves resorted to brutal, sadistic methods of murder.” For example, after capturing two Komsomol members, they were taken to the cemetery, “they were tortured for a long time, cut with knives, and then killed.” So, whose real portrait is this? Who’s the scariest of them all?

In the section ‘Principles of Mmurder and Treason’ the ideology and practice of ‘Ounivets fatherless people’ is ‘revealed’: “Reject morality and the gains of civilization!”, “Rape and slaughter!”, “Kill and hang!”. “This is what hatred of workers, years of service for the benefit of misanthropic fascism led the nationalist killers to,” Klym Dmytruk, a fighter of the Rashist ideological front, summarizes in this chapter of his book.

And in the chapter “Swastika on Cassocks” – a most interesting allegation is taking place: how “the St. Yura residence supported the pro-German orientation of nationalist centers.” It tells how “the old metropolitan, in addition to using the Uniate Church for anti-Soviet purposes, tried to intensify the subversive activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists by all the means at his disposal.”

This part of the book is dedicated to the activities of Metropolitan Andrii Sheptytskyi who had become a symbol of Ukrainian statehood at the time when Ukraine was split between Poland and Russia. Being a descendant of a rich family and, in fact, a millionaire, he established enterprises and institutions, schools and hospitals, and distributed scholarships to young Ukrainian artists. Moreover, he was the only one among prominent European cleric s openly opposing the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany. During the Second World War Metropolitan Sheptytskyi and his brother Climentii hid the Jews from the Nazis and urged his parishioners and the clerics to do so.

Instead, the Chekist lists the enterprises that Metropolitan Sheptytskyi founded for the development of economy, agriculture and banking institutions in the Western lands of Ukraine, which at that time were a part of Poland (these enterprises were “nationalized” by the Russians in 1939). These are such enterprises as “Narodna Torgivlya”, “Dniester” bank, “Silsky gospodar”, “Riznytsia”, “Dostava”, “Unia” oil refining enterprise, “Land Mortgage Bank”, etc.

Dmytruk claims that Vladyka Andrey “received profits” from these businesses and invested those in the “insidious work of the Uniates before the start of the war” – gathering intelligence data, intimidating young people with “terrible divine punishment” for participating in “public life”, spreading anti-Soviet rumors. And then he also “blessed the battalion of murderers for new crimes.”

Now let us think who of the well-known Russian clerics could be portrayed with such a precision in details? Patriarch Kirill, no? Who would say that it was impossible to build a time machine? But, as it was mentioned above, such a picture of Vladyka Andrey’s activities is still being widely spread in the world through by the Russian agents.

And one of the signs that the world has finally rejected Rashist propaganda from all spheres and began to perceive the history of Ukraine without the mediation of ‘universal liberators’, would be the long-awaited recognition of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi as the Righteous among the Nations.

The Basis of Rashism

 Now let us get back to the Jewish sanctuaries that are being destroyed by the Rashists today. Their “special attitude” to Jews, as well as to Ukrainians, has ancient and deep roots. And it is hidden, perhaps, in the denial of the One God or in a strange desire to “overpower” Him.

Professor of Columbia University in New York, a brilliant connoisseur of modern Russian culture, Mark Lipovetsky, told a lot of interesting things during his interview with the Russian editorial staff of Radio Svoboda. The notorious ‘combating cosmopolitanism’, in Soviet Russia, which turned into a powerful anti-Semitic campaign, did not disappear after Stalin’s death.

The ideology of Russian nationalism, being a fascist one by nature, penetrated the consciousness of the Soviet elites – Komsomol, Communist Party and cultural elites and became the banner of an active and influential nationalist movement among writers, artists and directors.

The professor reminds, in particular, of the 1979 debate “Classics and Us”, when a group of Russian writers protested ‘dominance of Jews at the Soviet theatre stage’.

This sort of views blossomed during the years of Perestroika after 1985 – then a scandal erupted around anti-Semitic society ‘Memorial’, and the speeches of Rasputin, Astafiev, Belov, and such magazines as ‘Nash Sovremennik’ and ‘Molodaya Gvardiya’ became quite popular.

Later on, the ‘issue’ continued in the works of the mastodon of Soviet and post-Soviet culture Nikita Mikhalkov. Mark Lypovetskyi believes that it was this decade-lasting trend, which had started the current Rashism.

The professor reminds of the writer and leader of the National Bolshevik Party, Eduard Limonov, popular, especially among young people, among whose follower was another writer, Zakhar Prilepin, known for his calls for war with Ukraine. Also, another Rashist ideologist, Alexander Dugin, came from the Yuzhinsky Pereulok community, the members of which studied the works of philosophers and social thinkers dripping with fascism and Nazism.

Added to all this was occultism and the ancient messianic idea of ​​Russia’s supremacy over the whole world, widespread in the elite circles of the Russian Federation and among its security forces.

‘We Can Repeat!’ “We will resurrect on the ruins of your cities and write your names in the Book of the Dead!!!” – such an inscription was left by the Rashists on the wall in the already mentioned torture chamber in Kozacha Lopan town, Kharkiv region. What a strange mixture of messianic faith, worshipping a bloodily deity and some native belief in a power of the enemy’s “scalp”…

In his article “On the Ruins of the Victory Temple”, historian Vitaly Nakhmanovych interprets rashism in the context of the newest “main military temple” of the Russian Federation – the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, located in Moscow and ‘dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, as well as to the military exploits of the Russian people during all wars’. The construction of the cathedral was completed on May 9, 2020. It can accommodate up to 6,000 people at the same time.

The walls of this temple are decorated with images of battle scenes. An inscription taking place under a grandiose mosaic, depicting tens of thousands of Russian soldiers in various uniforms with angels hushed on their knees, reads: ‘Civil war in China, war in Korea, armed conflicts in Hungary, Laos, Algeria, Yemen, war in ‘Vietnam, armed conflicts in Egypt, Syria, Mozambique, conflict in Czechoslovakia, conflict on Damansky Island, wars in Cambodia and Bangladesh, war in Angola, armed conflicts in Ethiopia and Nicaragua, fulfillment of international duty in Afghanistan, armed conflicts in Lebanon, Chad, conflict in Karabakh, war in Yugoslavia, armed conflicts in Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Transnistria, the First and Second Chechen wars, the fight against international terrorism in Syria, the reunification of Crimea.’

Vitaly Nakhmanovych notes that this temple is dedicated not to Christ and His Resurrection, but rather to Mars, the deity of war. The historian calls rashist belief “a religion of a Golden Age” and emphasizes that it is not only anti-Western, but also distinctly anti-Christian by nature.

 Historian is convinced that ‘In full accordance with old paganism, it demands a return to the ‘good old days’ instead of building a new, better world, including one based on God’s commandments,’ – The repetition of the “Great Victory” should lead to the restoration of what had followed it – transformation of Russia into a great power which defines the fate of the world.”

Father Aleksandr Men, who was physically “forced to silence” by the Rashists through murder in 1990, wrote: ‘the era of Stalinism, Maoism and other ‘-isms’ showed that a person, from whom God was taken away by force, still longs for a pseudo-god.’

Belief in a pseudo-god does not lead to life. It requires dragging other peoples, other countries, the whole world into the abyss.

It is important that the world understands this based on the experience of Ukraine, which today is holding back the newest horde at an extremely high cost. Perhaps this understanding will give mankind a new sense of the value of humanity and its powerful unity.

Yaroslava Muzychenko

Russia’s attack of February 24 was the latest test for the faithful of the churches and for church leaders. It was an even greater test for the leaders, because many of them had hitherto avoided recognizing the Russian aggression against Ukraine. In the following analysis, I will discuss the positions of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches regarding the Russian aggression.

Patriarch Kirill and “The Might of the Russian Warriors”

At the same time, on the eve of the attack on Ukraine, measures were being taken in Moscow to ideologically encourage the Russian soldiers before sending them to Ukraine. In particular, the Moscow Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev), placing a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin wall, declared:

Dear brothers, Russian soldiers! I greet you warmly on this day — the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland. This is first of all a remembrance of all those who gave their lives defending the sacred borders of our country. But this is also a tribute that we give to all those who also today are carrying out their military duty bravely and often at risk. The service of a soldier, the service of a defender of the Fatherland is always united with risks, especially those regarding what is most important for a person — health and life. We know that there cannot be war without sacrifices, and for that reason the people have and should always maintain special respect for those who voluntarily don a military uniform, take the oath, and swear loyalty to the Fatherland and readiness to defend its sacred borders. We live in peacetime, but we know that threats appear in peacetime too. Unfortunately, at the present moment, too, there exist threats — everyone knows what is happening on the borders of our Fatherland. Therefore I think that our military servicemen must have no doubts that they have chosen a very correct path in their lives. Because embarking on this path, you are protecting the people even without any military action. The strength of the armed forces, the might of Russian warriors — this is already a weapon that protects our people.

The next day, February 24, the Russian military, whom the Patriarch of Moscow had twice demonstratively wished peaceful skies in his brief appeal, set out to occupy Ukraine. As various observers report, according to Putin’s plans, the Russian forces were to occupy it within one to four days. The Ukrainians apparently were supposed to be frightened by “the might of the Russian warriors.” The fact that they were not frightened and mounted a spirited defense with heavy losses for the aggressor was a certain shock for the Russian leader. As is reported, he is now stating in a command bunker in the Urals.

Now Russia is trying to hush up not only its losses in Ukraine, but even the fact of its own attack. The website of the Moscow Patriarchate is likewise silent about these events, although the lion’s share of its structures remains precisely in Ukraine, and faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate are also suffering in this war. But in the virtual world, the Russian Orthodox Church continues to try to construct a kind of “peaceful reality” of its own. There is nothing about the Russian aggression in Ukraine. There is nothing about the Russian shelling of Ukrainian cities, including Mariupol.

On the whole, its messages fit in with, and are a part of, the narrative of the Russian authorities about how Ukraine has been seized by nationalists who are oppressing the Ukrainian people and that this people, as it were, is only waiting for Russia to liberate them. The logic of all these assertions is constructed entirely on the base of the concept of the “Russian world,” which both Patriarch Kirill and President Putin confess. But events themselves correct the foundations of the reality of these ideas: in Ukraine, both soldiers and the civilian population, which does not desire a return of Russian rule, meet the aggressor not with bread and salt, but with lethal shots and Molotov cocktails.

Challenges for the UOC-MP

The new stage of the Russian war against Ukraine has become a true test for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) of its loyalty to its declared Christian ideals. For this confession, many of the leaders and representatives of which for decades stressed their loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate, and also to the “Russian World,” the time has come “to gather stones together.” With its opposition to the idea of the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), and also with the activity of persons and organizations closely affiliated with Russian chauvinist circles, the UOC-MP caused its own loss of a significant number of its faithful, the exodus of a part of its parishes and clergy, and a considerable decline of its authority in society.

On February 24, the day of the Russian attack, this UOC-MP’s official site publicized an appeal of its head, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry, to the faithful and citizens of Ukraine:

A misfortune has taken place. Most regrettably, Russia has undertaken military action against Ukraine, and in this fatal hour I appeal to you not to panic, to be courageous and exhibit love for your fatherland and to each other. First of all, I call for intensified repentant prayer for Ukraine, for our army and our people; I ask you to forget your mutual conflicts and misunderstandings and unite in love for God and for our Fatherland. At this tragic time we express especial love and support for our soldiers, who stand on guard and are shielding and protecting our land and our people. May God bless and protect them! Defending the sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine, we also appeal to the President of Russia and request that he immediately stop this fratricidal war. The Ukrainian and Russian peoples emerged from the baptismal fount of the Dnipro and war between these peoples is a repetition of the sin of Cain, who killed his own brother out of envy. Such a war is justified by neither God nor man.

Soon after, the UOC-MP announced a blood drive, peace prayers in all Eparch its (again without any mention in the text of Russia as the aggressor), and correction of suspicions about a priest hiding arms in the church in the village of Uhryniv of the Volhynia Region, about a priest of that confession in the town of Bucha near Kyiv was a Russian saboteur, that a priest in the village of Ryasnyky of the RIvne Region had refused to hold a memorial service for a perished Ukrainian soldier, that in the Vinnytsia Region arms for Russian saboteurs were being stored in churches. Against the background of the execution by the Russian aggressors of the pastor of an OCU church in the village of Rozvazhiv of the Kyiv Region and of the chaplain Fr. Maksym Kozachyna, and the fact that his body, mutilated by the Russians, could only be buried on March 1, all these declarations on the part of the UOC-MP were to a significant extent understood by society as a belated justification for its previous actions in supporting the “Russian World.” These justifications were heard against the background of the fact that on February 28, Russian saboteurs had sought to infiltrate St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv. They were caught and neutralized. Most likely they could have been targeting the head of the OCU, His Beatitude Epifanii.

At the same time, church sources announced that the UOC-MP was helping refugees and victims, offering all its facilities in church basements in Kyiv and other cities of Ukraine as shelters during bombardment and shelling. In terms of geography, the disposition of this confession’s structures is especially timely, for a great many of them, thanks to the adepts of the “Russian World,” have ended up right in the middle of the zone of combat operations. Faithful of the Moscow Patriarchate die en masse from Russian bullets, shells, and missiles, and the eyewitnesses of this are the priests of this confession, who for decades had relayed to Ukrainians the ideological theses of the “Russian World.” These faithful, priests, and bishops see how the Moscow Patriarch is silent about the deaths and the wounds. Patriarch Kirill’s ignoring of the war organized by Russia poses existential questions before the faithful, clergy, and bishops of the UOC-MP.

In fact, in view of the brutal Russian shelling of civilian infrastructure in Sumy, Okhtyrka, and other towns of the Sumy Region, a report appeared on the site of the Sumy eparchy of the UOC-MP titled “The Sumy Eparchy of the UOC is ceasing commemoration of the Patriarch of Moscow,” signed by thirty clerics. This document includes a sharp criticism of Patriarch Kirill because of his ignoring of the war, and his recent activity is analyzed, concluding that “the Patriarch supports compelling Ukraine to renounce state sovereignty and its forcible inclusion into Russia,” and that “today we see no efforts on his part to protecting the suffering people of Ukraine.” The signers give assurance that they support those who have suffered from the Russian aggression, and that the termination of commemoration of the Moscow Patriarch does not mean leaving the UOC-MP.

This creates a certain dissonance. On February 25, an announcement appeared on the Facebook page of the Lviv Eparchy of the UOC to the effect that in that eparchy, commemoration of the Patriarch of Moscow was being discontinued, and that instead, the liturgical petitions would be sung according to the formula “May God protect our suffering nation of Ukraine.” As proof, a photo of the pertinent directive of the Metropolitan of Lviv and Halych of the UOC-MP Filaret (Kucherov) was provided. But in reality, to terminate commemoration is merely to stop informing the faithful that they still remain in the jurisdiction of the ROC. On March 1, the theologian Archimandrite Fr. Cyril Hovorun provided a clear, laconic explanation of the true essence of these results:

There has been a wave of refusals to commemorate Patriarch Kirill. If among the clergy who sign such appeals there is a hope that the mere commemoration of only Metropolitan Onufrii will do something similar to their canonical ties with the patriarch, then this is a total illusion. There’s no point in deluding oneself and others: as long as Metropolitan Onufrii commemorates Patriarch Kirill, all those who commemorate Onufrii remain in canonical subordination to Kirill. This are the basics of canon law…. The only canonical path is to return to full-fledged communion with world Orthodoxy, together with the Constantinopolitan, Alexandrian, and all the other Churches, together with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The alternative is to continue being transformed into a sect which has now become dangerous for human life.

Obviously, many from the UOC-MP are aware of the problematic nature of such a step as “discontinuing commemoration,” but as of March 1 not all of them would go even that far. However, a vivid testimony to the effects of hostilities in the eparchy of Sumy and Okhtyrka was the declaration of the pastor of a UOC-MP church Dmytro Dolhy, who said, “I renounce Patriarch Kirill and the Moscow Patriarchate.” This was followed on March 1 with the appearance of a video with an appeal of priests of the UOC-MP to His Beatitude Onufrii to break with the Moscow Patriarchate. In this video, there are also appeals to Patriarch Kirill, in both Ukrainian and Russian. One of the priests states:

I am ceasing to commemorate your name in the divine services in our church. This is my answer to your silence during Russia’s war with Ukraine and your enabling of the president of Russia Putin in everything, which has led to this war. We considered you a father, but you have turned out to be worse than a stepfather. God is your judge.

What is characteristic of these appeals is the continued ignoring of the fact that an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) exists in that country. Thus, in appealing for a Council, the aforesaid portion of the clergy of the UOC-MP in effect is calling for the creation in Ukraine of another parallel autocephalous Orthodox confession. But a part of the faithful of the UOC-MP also understands the unrealistic nature of such a multiplication of autocephalies. For this reason, a new wave of direct transfers of its communities to the OCU has begun.

In sum, as a result of the actions of its representatives and leaders during the past decades, the UOC-MP has become a hostage of the current situation and is again forced to justify itself. As one of the sources of the dissemination in Ukraine of the ideas of the “Russian World” during peacetime, and also after the beginning of the war in the Luhansk and Donetsk Regions, after the occupation of the Ukrainian Crimea, and after the Russian attack on February 24, 2022, this confession expectedly was subjected to various suspicions, the bases for which it had itself systematically created. All the same, a significant part of the declarations of the hierarchs and clergy of the UOC-MP remains ambivalent, and its measures — half-hearted.     

The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the OCU

On the first day of the new phase of the war, February 24, Ecumencial Patriarch Bartholomew  called the head of the OCU Metropolitan Epifanii (Dumenko) with words of support for Ukraine and condemnation of Russia’s actions. The official announcement of the OCU in this regard states:

The Ecumenical Patriarch has condemned this unprovoked attack of Russia against Ukraine, an independent and sovereign European nation, as well as the violations of human rights and the brutal violence against our neighbors and chiefly against the peaceful population. The Patriarch asks the God of love and peace to enlighten the leadership of the Russian Federation that they might understand the tragic consequences of such decisions and actions, which could provoke even a world war. The Ecumenical Patriarch has also called upon the leaders of all nations, European institutions and international organizations to work on the peaceful resolution of this critical situation by way of honest dialogue, which is the only means to resolve any problem and settle any dispute. The Ecumenical Patriarch has called upon the Local Orthodox Churches in a fraternal spirit, as well as all Christians and every person of good will to unceasing prayer for the Ukrainian people and for the supremacy of peace and justice in Ukraine.

That same day, His Beatitude Epifanii issued an appeal on the occasion of the Russian aggression in which he called for prayers for Ukraine and asked the international community to support Ukraine. It was stated in the appeal that

Despite the extended, sincere, and persistent efforts of Ukraine and the entire international community, an unprovoked, underhanded, cynical attack of Russia and Belarus on Ukraine has taken place.  It is our common task to repel the enemy, to defend our native land, our future and the future of new generations from tyranny, which the aggressor desires to bring upon its bayonets. Truth is on our side. Therefore with God’s help and the support of the entire civilized world, the enemy will be defeated. Our present task is to be united, to withstand the first shock, not to give in to panic. We believe in God’s providence and the victory of truth.

In the following days, the head of the OCU also turned to the faithful with words of support. And on February 27, he made an appeal to the Moscow Patriarch Kirill. Pointing out that it was already the fourth day of the war, and having analyzed the Patriarch’s activity, the metropolitan stated that:

Unfortunately, it is already clear from your previous statements that preserving the favor of Putin and the ROC leadership is much more important for you than care for the people in Ukraine, a part of whom considered you their pastor before the war. It therefore hardly makes sense to appeal to you to do something active to immediately stop Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. […] Therefore I appeal to you as head of the ROC: at least show some mercy for your fellow citizens and your flock. If you cannot raise your voice against aggression, at least help in gathering the bodies of the Russian soldiers whose lives are the price of your and your President’s idea of the “Russian world.”

There was no reply to this appeal.

On February 27, it was reported that the Russian occupants had executed the pastor of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine church in the village of Rozvazhiv, Kyiv Region, and the chaplain Fr. Maksym Kozachyna in their automobile (the latter’s body, mutilated by the Russians, could only be buried on March 1). And the next day, Russian saboteurs sought to infiltrate St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv; they were detained and neutralized. Their target may well have been the head of the OCU, His Beatitude Epifanii.  

On February 28, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, reported his telephone conversation with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on Twitter: “Your words are like hands that sustain us in this difficult time. Ukrainians feel the spiritual support and power of your prayers. We hope that peace will come soon.”

The Apostolic See and the Nunciature in Kyiv

The Apostolic See expresses its constant support to Ukraine, although in the vortex of turbulent and noisy military events, it has to be admitted, Ukrainians at first did not hear its voice, and then questions arose such as “Why is the pope silent?” At the very time before the beginning of the Russian aggression when many mass media were announcing it, Pope Francis persistently and frequently called for prayer for peace in Ukraine.  On February 23, the pontiff announced March 2 as a day of fasting for peace in Ukraine, saying:

I feel a deep pain in my heart because of the deterioration of the situation in Ukraine. Despite the diplomatic efforts of the last few weeks, alarming scenarios continue to develop. Like me, many people in the world around the world experience alarm and concern. Private interests again threaten the peace of all. I wish to appeal to those who bear responsibility in the political sphere that they make a serious examination of conscience before God, Who is the God of peace, and not war, the Father of all, and not just of some, Who desires that we be brethren, and not enemies. I ask all the parties involved to abstain from any action that could cause even greater suffering of the population , destabilizing coexistence among peoples and discrediting international law. And now I wish to appeal to all, believers and unbelievers. Jesus taught us that we should respond to the diabolical insanity of violence with God’s weapons: prayer and fasting. I urge everyone to spend March 2, Ash Wednesday, as a day of fasting for peace. I especially urge the faithful to persistently dedicate themselves on this day to prayer and fasting. May the Queen of Peace safeguard the world from the madness of war.

On the morning of February 25, Pope Francis went in person to the embassy of Russia to the Holy See, in fact for the first time in history, because up to then, the popes had received ambassadors only at their own offices. As the Ukrainian Service of Radio Vatican reported, “During the visit, which lasted over two hours, as the director of the Vatican press office Matteo Bruni confirmed, the pope wished to express his concern about the war in Ukraine.”

On February 26, amidst reports of military action and street fighting in Kyiv, the pope had a telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. According to a tweet of the Embassy of Ukraine to the Holy See, “The Holy Father expressed his deep pain on the occasion of the tragic events in our country.” In a tweet of the President of Ukraine we read: “I thanked Pope Francis for his prayers for peace in Ukraine and for a ceasefire. The Ukrainian people feel His Holiness’ spiritual support.”

On the same day, the Pontiff tweeted again in the Ukrainian language with an appeal to pray for peace in Ukraine and to fast for peace. Also on February 26, the pope made a warning tweet in the Russian language, and thus obviously addressed to the Russians: “Every war makes our world worse than it was before. War is the failure of politics, a failure of humanity, a shameful capitulation, a crushing defeat before the forces of evil.”

Against the background of all these events, the Apostolic Nuncio in Ukraine, Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, remains in Kyiv together with the officials of the nunciature. On February 27 an interview with His Excellency was posted on the website of the nunciature, where it was stated in the introduction: “He is sharing the fate of millions of civilian residents who are seeking protection from the fighting that has erupted in the city.”

The Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine

Roman Catholic Archbishop and Metropolitan of Lviv Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki appealed on February 24 to his clergy and faithful with these words:

At this time, when the most horrible scenarios are being realized, when a state of war has been announced in Ukraine, I turn to you with a word of encouragement and solidarity. All of us feel endangered; nevertheless, we must not lose hope, not to speak of falling into panic. Now, as never before, we need unity and mutual support. I therefore ask all priests and those in consecrated life to remain with their faithful and not to leave their parishes.

On the same day, Bishop Edward Kawa called for prayer for Ukraine and stated that the right to defend one’s land and one’s family is a God-given right. The bishop also warned against spreading unverified information, called for assistance for those in need, and assured the faithful that the clergy remained with them and was ready to help with everything necessary and possible. In brief, the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine is organizing a whole series of humanitarian initiatives aimed at helping the victims: from psychological and therapeutic assistance to mobilizing the structures of Caritas International.

The UGCC

Every time Russia has occupied Ukrainian lands, it has destroyed the Uniate Church, known today in Ukraine as the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church. Being deeply rooted in Ukrainian reality and culture, it remains unhesitatingly with its people during the Russian war against Ukraine. In his appeal to the Ukrainian people issued on February 24 at the patriarchal cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Kyiv, the head of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said:

The treacherous enemy, disregarding his own obligations and assurances, breaking the fundamental norms of international law, has entered the Ukrainian land as an unjust aggressor, bringing death and ruin. Our Ukraine, which the world has justly termed a “bloodland,” which so many times has been stained with the blood of martyrs and fighters for the freedom and independence of their people, is calling us today to stand up in its defense, in defense of its dignity before God and humanity, its right to exist and its right to choose its future. It is our natural right and our sacred duty to defend our land and our people, our nation and everything that we hold dearest: our families, our language and culture, our history and our spiritual world!

On the day before the attack, though not for the first time, His Beatitude Sviatoslav had stressed to the participants of an international forum in Italy that Ukraine was defending European values at the cost of its children’s blood. Like other confessions, the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church is carrying out a whole series of emergency humanitarian projects in support of war victims.

Thus, the Russian and Belarusian attack on Ukraine of February 24, 2022 marked the beginning of a new and more extensive stage of the Russian war against Ukraine. None of the so-called “traditional” confessions remained untouched by these events. So far, the ROC headed by the Moscow Patriarch Kirill is systematically trying to ignore the realities and justify some kind of parallel reality in accord with the needs of justifying Russian aggression and even to conceal it in order to preserve its ideas of the “Russian World.” Other voices are beginning to be heard from the head of the UOC-MP, which so far has cleaved closely to these ideas. This period is unusually difficult for this confession, for the realities have fundamentally contradicted the theses it has hitherto maintained, especially about Ukraine’s “fraternal” nations of Russia and Belarus. There is no basis, however, for thinking that the change in position, and the rhetoric accompanying it, is irreversible. The OCU, Roman Catholics and Greco-Catholics, in their turn, are acting in support of Ukraine.

 

Volodymyr Moroz, PhD

Research Fellow, Institute of the History of the Church, Ukrainian Catholic University

Editor in Chief, “Patriyarkhat”