Of God, Territory, Titles, And Threats

Recently our friends at The Ukraine Report-2004 (http://www.artukraine.com) passed along a most interesting item taken from Rome’s ZENIT News Services. It seems that Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I has urged Pope John Paul II not to establish a Greek-Catholic patriarchate in Kyiv, warning him that to do so would risk a break in ecumenical relations. This occurred in the discussion of a document presented by Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, to Aleksiy II, patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’. Aleksiy II sent the document, which alludes to the eventual recognition of a patriarchal title for the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics, to other Orthodox patriarchs. Obviously, Patriarch Aleksiy was able to prevail upon the Ecumenical Patriarch to support him in yet another battle for what he considers to be Moscow’s canonical territory.

In the letter dated November 29, Patriarch Bartholomew I rejected Cardinal Kasper’s document, labeling it “erroneous, confused, unacceptable, provocative,” and after a lengthy refutation of the cardinal’s historical-canonical document, warned about the possible negative consequences of an eventual recognition of a patriarchal title for the Greek- Catholic Church in Ukraine, which “will cause strong reactions on the part of all the Orthodox sister Churches and will put a stop to attempts to continue the theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and Orthodox Churches,” the Italian magazine 30 Giorni reported. In his letter to the Pope, Bartholomew I said there is a danger “of returning to the climate of hostility that reigned up to a few decades ago.”

“Therefore,” the Patriarch wrote, “it is necessary that you assure the Ukrainian people and all the Orthodox Churches with persuasive force that you have no intention of initiating the institution of the Greek-Catholic Patriarchate in Ukraine as Cardinal Kasper’s text alludes.”

Like all church politics, the issue here might seem a bit incomprehensible to the layman. It really has to do with fifteenth and sixteenth century church history, which from the perspective of the twenty-first seems not always to have been ruled by the highest spiritual values. In 1439 Orthodox hierarchs, under instructions from the Eastern Emperor who hoped to thereby secure aid for the struggle of what was left of the Byzantine Empire against the Ottoman Turks, signed the Union of Florence, agreeing to accept the primacy of the Pope and settling certain other theological questions in Rome’s favor. The aid was not forthcoming, and in 1453 Constantinople fell, placing the Ecumenical Patriarch under the rule of the Muslim Ottoman sultan, who wanted to break all ties between the Eastern Church, the center of which was in his territory, and the Western Church, which was not. Thus the Union of Florence, never accepted by all, was dutifully rejected at an Orthodox church synod in 1472 and has been anathema to Orthodox dogma ever since. Incidentally, this was still quite some time before Constantinople approved the transfer of the metropolitan’s throne of Kyiv to the jurisdiction of Moscow in exchange for some very rich bribes.

To be fair, these were also not the best of times for Catholicism. The Union of Florence occurred only two decades after the Catholic Great Schism came to an end at the Council of Constance to decide between three papal claimants declaring one, Gregory XII, the legitimate vicar of Christ and John XXIII, who had called the conference in the first place, an “antipope.” 1472 was also only about four years before one Caesare Borgia, hero of Machiavelli’s Prince, was born the illegitimate son of future Pope Alexander VI, perhaps the worst excuse for a priest in the whole history of Christianity. Incidentally, in 1453 the Turks were helped in taking Constantinople by Venice, a Roman Catholic republic with its own patriarch.

Later during the Counterreformation, Rome, in agreement with a number of Orthodox bishops, decided to renew the Union of Florence with the 1596 Union of Brest-Litovsk, thus creating the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, whose relations with those who remained Orthodox were bitter and often violent. Accepting Roman dogma but retaining the Eastern rite, its own calendar of saints, it has for centuries constituted the bedrock of the Ukrainian identity in Western Ukraine, even when banned by the Soviets. Its estimated seven million Ukrainian faithful now make it the largest of the five Eastern rite Uniate Churches under the Pope. Meanwhile, Ukrainian Catholics, first in the diaspora and later in independent Ukraine, have worked for many years to have their spiritual leader given the dignity a patriarch. Recognizing the level of development reached by its Church, the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Synod’s plenary assembly, held in Kyiv in July 2002, asked the Holy Father to sanction this process by granting it the patriarchal title. After all, if Venice has a Catholic patriarch, why not Kyiv? And the Pope has the power to recognize on his own initiative the patriarchal rank of a church. The complex and less than glorious history of this particular issue is something that men of God might consider putting behind them.

Many Ukrainians have understandable reasons for not wanting to be under the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Russian Orthodox Church not long ago canonized the last tsar, Nicholas II, a thorough reactionary of whom it seems the best that can be said is that he was executed by the Bolsheviks. One can buy icons depicting the autocrat who encouraged pogroms and ordered a demonstration of workers led by Father Gapon fired upon, thereby touching off the Revolution of 1905, from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Who could be next, Nicholas’s spiritual guide, Grigory Rasputin? This church, in turn, has declared Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarch Filaret of Kyiv a schismatic, while Constantinople weighs the issue.

The central player here is the Russian Orthodox Church, which seems to consider that all Ukraine’s Christians should be Orthodox, and all Ukraine’s Orthodox under Moscow. It should be noted that this particular church, has been trading in oil since 1990 and allegedly received a gift of five million barrels from one Saddam Hussein, who seems to have similarly generous to a number of other unlikely groups in Russia and elsewhere. This was reported by RFE/RL Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch on February 3 (www.rferl.org/corruptionwatch), citing the Iraqi daily newspaper Al-Mada of January 25. The charges are being denied in Russia and investigated in Iraq.

Whatever the outcome of the Iraq investigation, it should also be considered that in Kyiv last year the local followers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) were involved in a number of illegal property seizures (occupation by monks and nuns, while police looked on and did nothing), including the Kyiv premises of the US-Ukraine Foundation, the main sponsor of The Ukraine Report-2004 and quite a number of other good works.

Hence, in deciding whether to give the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church a patriarch, one hopes that Pope John-Paul II or his successor will take the warning mentioned above for precisely what it is worth.