From Rocco Palmo’s Whispers in the Loggia:
As foreseen yesterday, this morning the Pope accepted the retirement of Cardinal Lubomyr Husar as major-archbishop of Kiev and head of the 5 million-member Ukrainian Greek-Catholic church worldwide.
With the departure of the 77 year-old hierarch on grounds of poor health, the leadership of the largest Eastern fold in communion with Rome is now up for grabs, and going into next month’s Synod to elect his successor, the stakes are high well beyond the ecclesial front.
For starters, the choice of the UGCC’s 26th head will, in all likelihood, mark a generational shift at the church’s helm. Each tipped to receive serious consideration to succeed to the (de facto) patriarch’s chair, three of the body’s four metropolitans — the Synod’s most senior figures after Husar, all likewise elected by it to their current posts — are 60 or younger, two of them having spent their whole lives in the diaspora.
In the meanwhile, the church’s second-ranking figure at home, Archeparch Ivor Vozniak, 58 — Husar’s onetime deputy in his former seat of Lviv — has been named the church’s temporary head pending the Synod of Election, which must convene within a month. Prior to his ascent, the now-retired cardinal was the lead aide to his predecessor, Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky, who led the church for 17 years until his death in 2001 at 86.
Above all, though, the selection of the next major-archbishop will be watched with considerable attention far outside Ukrainian and Catholic circles alike for the decision’s potential impact on the delicate relationship between the Vatican and the Kremlin — a slowly warming rapport whose continued improvement ranks atop Benedict XVI’s religious and geopolitical priorities all around.
For his part, Husar’s decade-long tenure has had its share of tensions with Ukraine’s predominant Orthodox church. The latter closely linked with the formidable Moscow patriarchate — that is, the ecumenical constituency to which Benedict has invested his most intense energies as Pope — the UGCC has long been accused of proselytism andinterference by its Orthodox counterparts, and the two groups havesparred over the construction of churches.
Along the way, the Greek-Catholics prominently inflamed pockets of Orthodox tensions with Husar’s 2005 move to Kiev (the traditional cradle of Russian Christianity and seat of the UOC), coupled with his push to build a grand cathedral there (above), the preliminary chapel of which was set ablaze in 2005 in an act immediately blamed on Orthodox aggression. (Dedicated to the Resurrection, the Kiev cathedral’s exterior was completed last fall.)
Most recently, in one of his last major statements in office, the cardinal — invariably a fierce advocate of his church’s fullest standing in society — blasted an enhanced state recognition for the UOC (one of three Orthodox branches in Ukraine).
Saying that the country’s constitution ensured equal status under the law for each religious body, Husar warned that “when we can witness a clearly biased, despite all the assurances to the contrary, attitude of the regime toward a specified church, this favoritism begins to create tensions.”
The development, he said, “is dangerous for the nation’s peace.”
In its relations with the Orthodox churches on post-Soviet turf, Rome has often found itself walking a delicate balance, and no more is that the case than in the sizable orbit of the Moscow patriarchate.
Even as its diaspora grew and the leaders of the persecuted fold were arrested before being scattered in exile, the Vatican has maintained a half-century reluctance to accord the patriarchal dignity to the head of the Ukrainian church, inventing the designation of major-archbishop in 1963 after Paul VI was petitioned to elevate the fold’s then-head, Cardinal Joseph Slipyj, to the full status of an Eastern chief. While John Paul II naturally enjoyed a particular bond with the faithful just across the border from his Polish homeland, even he declined the step. And given Benedict’s priority on improving relations with Orthodoxy’s most hard-line branch, not only would the question seem even less likely to be broached in the current pontificate (at least, barring a sudden, epic detente with Moscow), but a realm of thought on this front has seen the reigning Pope as having given more emphasis to external relations than that of the churches within his own care. Whether this mindset reflexively plays out in the choice of a successor from Husar’s mould of an unstinting, battle-ready defense of the church’s prerogatives, as opposed to a more diplomatic figure, hangs as a key variable in the run-up to the Synod — one which, again, could have ramifications far beyond Kiev.
Coincidentally, last week marked two years since Rome’s most significant recent triumph on the Orthodox front — the election of Metropolitan Kirill, the Russian church’s chief ecumenist, who became particularly well-regarded at the Holy See, as patriarch of Moscow following the death of the more strident Alexei II.
To the degree that the Russian Synod was looking outside, its choice of the moderate, media-savvy dialogue chief was likely aided by the Vatican’s 2007 appointment of a more collaborative cleric — the Italian priest of Communion and Liberation Paolo Pezzi — as the capital’s Catholic archbishop, replacing a prelate whose departure the Orthodox had ardently sought.
Though Kirill and Benedict have built a history of warm relations from the former’s prior assignment, to date, no meeting between a Roman pontiff and incumbent Russian patriarch has ever taken place… and to say that the historic encounter is high on B16’s “bucket list” reaches the realm of understatement.
While the Moscow chief is thought to be just as personally disposed for the moment to happen, as patriarch, Kirill first has to assuage his hard-liners. And it’s likewise on Benedict’s radar that his hierarchs refrain from presenting any obstacles that would galvanize the significant resistance in both churches to better relations, largely thanks to the concessions each would have to make along the way.
To be sure, in a December address, Husar lamented the “stereotype” that “Greek Catholics are the problem for reaching agreements between the Moscow Patriarchate and Roman Pope.”
“The pope and the Patriarch of Moscow cannot reach an agreement on many other things,” the cardinal said.
“You see, we are the unfortunate Greek Catholics on the border between the two great cultures – the Byzantine and Latin ones, between Roman Catholicism and confessional Orthodoxy – as we consider ourselves the Orthodox in unity with the Apostolic See.”
Still, the truth remains the Vatican’s prized path to Moscow could well be affected by what happens in Kiev. So on multiple points of the map, get ready for an interesting month.
Eirenikon 
“Orthodoxy’s most hard-line branch?” Gaah! Rocco should spend more time talking to the Greeks. Moscow’s a pussycat!
Yes, Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus would be a good one to interview. :-)
I am surprised that the Patriarch had to submit his resignation to Pope Benedict. It seems to me that it should be an internal matter for the UGCC Synod of Bishops. (Btw I am RC, but irked by these sorts of requirements for Eastern Churches by Rome that make the Eastern Church seem less than full church with all the dignity that should come with that)
It’s not a requirement, Mitch, it’s a customary courtesy as Bennedict is going to have to approve his successor. It would appear he informed the Vatican last year, and was asked to hold on a bit longer. Nothing except a sense of responsibility and good manners prevented the archbishop from heading for the beach without the Pope’s say so.
“Coincidentally, last week marked two years since Rome’s most significant recent triumph on the Orthodox front — the election of Metropolitan Kirill, the Russian church’s chief ecumenist…”
This assertion is inexcusably arrogant, and I’m certain that neither Benedict XVI nor Cardinal Kasper would make such a preposterous claim.
Kirill was elected Patriarch because, among other things, he was far and away the Moscow Patriarchate’s best bishop-communicator (he had his own TV show, for starters), and had unparalleled experience both within Russia and abroad. The other contenders for the Patriarchal throne were either too old (Met. Juvenaly, Met. Filaret of Minsk), sick and unwilling (Met. Volodymyr of Kyiv), or too feared and seen as too close for comfort to the Kremlin (Met. Kliment).
I make no claim to eminence myself, but despite my own theological leanings I still feel deeply embarrassed by how stereotypically we Catholics tend to report news from the Orthodox East. (Not that the Orthodox are any better in reporting on Roman Catholic matters!) If this is the level of mutual knowledge between Orthodoxy and Catholicism then forget about intercommunion in the near future.
Einstein said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Who can really expect an improvement in Orthodox – Greek-Catholic relations when the GC continues to “lament the stereotype that the GC are the problem for reaching agreements between the Moskow Patriarchate and Roman Pope” and continues to “blast” an “enhanced state recognition of the UOC (MP)” ?
Byzantine Catholics in Ukraine remember keenly both the suppression of their Church under Czarist and then Soviet rule, and the complicity of the Moscow Patriarchate in that suppression. They are thus understandably wary of over-cozy relations between the state and the patriarchate. You are perhaps aware that since the recent change of government in Ukraine, state security officials in various parts of the country have paid “visits” to Byzantine Catholic clergy that these clergy describe as a just a tad shy of actual harassment. This isn’t helpful in creating an atmosphere of mutual confidence and trust.
Even if less than sinister motives are involved, given that Ukraine has two Catholic Churches (Eastern and Latin) and three Orthodox, giving explicit and favored recognition to one with only very dubious claims to majority support can also be seen as partisan point scoring. The political opposition and former government enjoy particularly strong support among Catholics and Ukrainian nationalists, whereas the new government is viewed as pro-Russian.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholics have been much-persecuted both by the Orthodox and by Latin Catholics, so I think they’re entitled to some leeway in expressing their fears and emotions. I also think that the Vatican should be more forceful in speaking out for the rights of the Greek Catholics.
However, some of the rhetoric of Cardinal Husar has implicitly been critical not just of the Russian Orthodox but of other Catholics as well. In some recent statements Cardinal Husar has spoken to the effect that the UGCC in principle does not want to receive any donations from the authorities because the UGCC wants to remain free. Now, perhaps his only intention was to implicitly accuse the UOC-MP of being Yanukovych’s puppet, but given that the Roman Catholic Churh continues to receive significant state support (whether officially or unofficially) in many historically Catholic countries — support that is often essential to the Church’s educational, charitable and medical services — the accusation was double-edged, to say the least.
Orthodox also have long memories. They don’t forget how Unia was imposed in Ukraine (and not only, think of Transylvania).
It remains that despite the agreement that the “Uniatism can no longer be accepted either as a method to be followed nor as a model of the unity our Churches are seeking” (Balamand), the exact reverse happened.
I can’t speak for Transylvania (and probably Austrian Ruthenia) where Austro-Hungarian coercion probably did play a role, but no force was applied in Ukraine on the Catholic side. This is largely a post facto Orthodox myth served up to justify the Czarist conquest. Indeed much of the Ukrainian Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth actually opted to stay out of the Union with Rome and continued as before with minimal civil disabilities.
The point we should remember, however, is that whatever the wrongs of the past, people today should be free to chose their own religious loyalties and affiliations. Whatever happened in the 15th and 16th centuries, the post 1990 spontaneous revival of Ukrainian Catholic Church after decades of suppression is clear evidence that the “imposed” union as far as its millions of members were concerned was that with Russian Orthodoxy, not with Rome.
Ukrainian Catholics are nether yours nor mine to dispose of as we think historically appropriate. The Balamand declaration you cite also recognized the right of the Greek Catholic Churches to exist: “The Oriental Catholic Churches who have desired to re-establish full communion with the See of Rome and have remained faithful to it, have the rights and obligations which are connected with this communion.”
Michael,
You should revise your history. Maybe the name of Josaphat Kuntsevich would ring a bell. The whole “eastern question” stems from the forced conversion of the Russians from Poland and Lithuania which starts with the Synod of Brest-Litovsk of 1595-96, before the Hapsburgs swallowed Galicia.
What “Russians”? Or are Bielorussians, Ukrainians and Ruthenians just Russians to you?
I should admittedly qualify my earlier remarks. What I meant was that Union was not imposed by the Polish Lithuanian state. No one was “forced” to convert. Yes, Eastern Catholics and Orthodox often came to blows over the control of individual churches, and Josaphat (who was rather ham-fisted as a Uniate archbishop) was murdered by an angry Orthodox mob. But in 1633, the Orthodox Church and its episcopate, far from having been brutally suppressed as would happen to Catholics under Russian rule, even received official recognition. Peter of Mohyla, for example, served peacefully as metropolitan of Kiev under Polish rule.
Contrast this with the fact that the whole Uniate episcopate was murdered, or died in a gulag under Stalin. Its Orthodox counterpart was only too happy to “swallow” up the Uniate property that were tossed its way–property that it shamelessly fought tooth and nail against returning to its rightful owners after the end of Soviet rule.
Seriously, I don’t think an appeal to history supports a claim of Orthodox martyrdom here, or even shows the Orthodox side in a particularly positive light. If Ukranian Catholics are bitter and suspicious of Moscow, it’s with good reason.
But shoving history under the carpet won’t help either.
I entirely agree. One of the things I most appreciate about the North American dialogue is that it has manifested a willingness to strive towards an agreed historical narrative in which to place the dogmatic and cannonical issues that separate the two communions.
There is no denying, for example, that Rome did sponsor largely artificial uniate Churches, through Latin missionaries assuming Eastern garb and pretending to be Eastern clergy, though the resulting Eastern Catholic Churches were, and remain miniscule. There is now an agreed understanding that this is the wrong approach to reunion. But such questionable tactics were not the origin of the union with Rome of the Ukrainian and Melchite Churches, and pretending that they were when the principals involved know otherwise is never going to advance things.
All,
In general the Ukrainians, Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic, want to keep themselves distant from Moscow. They are known for being a very nationalistic group who in no way are Russians just because Russians think they are. Same goes for the “Ruthenians” or Carpatho-Russians/Rusyns. The Ukrainian government can tell them they are really Ukrainians, continue to supress their language from being published or taught in schools, but the Carpatho-Russians know better. If you ask me they are all the same people from the ancient Rus.
I think it is important to emphasize that Ukrainian Catholics have no beef with Orthodoxy per se; it is specifically the Moscow Patriarchate and its association with their persecution that gets their hair on end. Relations with the two “non-canonical” Orthodox Churches in Ukraine are actually quite correct (if not actually warm and fuzzy). Similarly, relations are also excellent between Melchites and Antiochan Orthodox. So “Uniates” and Orthodox are not condemned to hate each other.
If Russian and anti-Catholic Orthodox stopped treating Ukrainian and Ruthenian Catholics like escaped slaves, imposters, or mindless thralls, I am sure the intercommunal climate on the ground would improve immensely. We should all welcome as important steps in this direction Patriarch Kirill’s efforts to tone down the hostility and distance himself from the polemic rhetoric of the past. Perhaps he should send other Orthodox Churches a memo.
Check this out it seems Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox bishops can get along in the diaspora in uniting against Russia. http://www.uocofusa.org/news_110207_3.html.
So this is all about. Union against Russia! It is argued that the Unia of Brest was demanded by the Ukrainians in order to escape the embrace of Russia. Same tune.
Seraphim,
I can only speak for myself, but I see clear signs that Moscow is trying to move away from its long association with the state as an instrument of Russian imperialism.
This past association is an incontestable historical fact. You need look no further than the implicitly phyletist cognomen “Russian Orthodox Church” foisted on the Church by Peter the Great when he suppressed the Patriarchate, the complete suppression of the ancient Georgian Church, the Patriarchate’s consistent support for the aggressive drive of the Muscovite princes to assert a historically unprecedented sovereignty over the non-Russian Slavic peoples to their West, and finally its supine willingness to be perverted as an instrument of Soviet control in Western Ukraine.
And yes, a big part of the original motivation behind the Union of Brest was the relentless pressure being put on the Ukrainian nobility by Moscow to accept pro-Muscovite bishops. If you compare the two forms of government on offer (the highly decentralized and “liberal” Commonwealth vs. the brutally tyrannical autocracy of the Muscovite princes), not to mention the higher level of culture and literacy enjoyed in Ukraine at the time, this fear of Muscovite imperialism becomes understandable.
It strikes me that Kirill gets it, and that the Patriarchate is now finally attempting to return to its original vocation in exercising a strictly regional primacy for North-eastern Europe. This is, in part, why I think Rome has been wise in not recognizing the entirely understandable aspirations of Ukrainian Catholics to see a separate ethnically Ukrainian Patriarchate return to Kiev. But bridging centuries of mistrust takes time, and steps that smack of bringing back Russian Orthodoxy as the state Church in Ukraine are bound to raise hackles. This has little to do with the current state of Catholic-Orthodox relations.
It is bad to shove history under the carpet, but it is worse to jumble it. Even worse is to confuse history (Russian in this case) with the propaganda (anti-Russian, anti-Putin, anti-Kirill for that matter) peddled by the fearless fighters against “Russian-Bolshevik-Muskovite ‘tyranny’ (the supporters of the assorted Berezovskys, Khodorkovskys, Kasparovs, Nemtsovs and Limonovs, wholeheartedly supported by the biased anti-Russian western media).
Patriarch Kirill was unequivocal recently in naming the Unia the stumbling block in Orthodox-Catholic relations. He was in no way encouraging displaced enthusiasms for his readiness to cave in to papal blandishments and the Pope also doused those enthusiasms. He rightly warned those enthusiasts that Russians “fear the Catholic Church” (for good historical reasons!). Therefore he advised them to take their time. We only hope that this advise contains also the urge for the Catholic Church to repent. Only then her return would be greeted with the joy with which the Prodigal Son was received back.
I have heard talk that if Rome granted a Ukrainian Patriarchate that many Orthodox would join that Church.
I’m not sure if they actually would, but Rome considers national Churches to be ecclesiological aberrations, and so probably won’t take that step in Ukraine unless Moscow recognizes an autochephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church first. The only substantive patriarchates (as opposed to titular ones like Venice or Lisbon) that Rome recognizes are the ancient ones, or the ones that entered into the Roman communion already holding or claiming that distinction.
In Rome’s eyes, the Moscow Patriarchate remains the legitimate continuation of the old Kievan one.
Is it not a disgrace to all of us that we engage in hailing the sins of others, while often swallowing the proverbial camel? Enough of the nationalism rant, please. It serves no constructive purpose in Christian dialogue in love.
Well said, Father. Comments are closed.