| Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church | |
| St. George's Cathedral in Lviv served as the mother church of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church during 19th and 20th centuries. | |
| Classification | Catholic |
|---|---|
| Orientation | Eastern Catholic, Byzantine Rite |
| Polity | Episcopal |
| Leader | Sviatoslav Shevchuk |
| Geographical areas | Ukraine, Ukrainian diaspora |
| Origin | 1595 (claimed 988) Brest, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth |
| Separated from | Eastern Orthodox Church |
| Merge of | Roman Catholic Church |
| Separations | Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada |
| Members | 4,223,425 |
| Other name(s) | Ukrainian Catholic Church, "Uniate" church |
| Official website | http://www.ugcc.org.ua/ |
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) (Ukrainian: Українська Греко-Католицька Церква (УГКЦ), Ukrainska Hreko-Katolytska Tserkva), is the largest Eastern Rite Catholic sui juris particular church in full communion with the Holy See, and is directly subject to the Pope. The Primate of the Church holds the office of Archbishop-Major of Kiev-Halych and All Rus, though the hierarchs of the church have acclaimed their primate "Patriarch" and have requested Papal recognition of, and elevation to, this title. The Church is one of the successor Churches to the acceptance of Christianity by Grand Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev, in 988. The Church has followed the spread of the Ukrainian diaspora, and now has some 40 hierarchs in over a dozen countries on four continents, including three other metropolitans in Poland, the United States, and Canada. The head of the church is Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, since March 2011
Within Ukraine itself, the UGCC is a minority faith of the religious population, being a distant second to the majority Eastern Orthodox faith. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the second largest religious organization in Ukraine in terms of number of communities. In terms of number of faithful, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church ranks third in allegiance among the population of Ukraine, after the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate. Currently, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church predominates in three western oblasts of Ukraine, but constitutes a small minority elsewhere in the country.
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The Ukrainian Catholic Church did not exist, as such, until the Union of Brest in the late 16th century, but its roots go back to the very beginning of Christianity in Mediaeval Slavic State of Rus'. The area of modern-day Ukraine was primarily influenced by Byzantine missionaries. The mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius was especially important as their development of the Cyrillic alphabet allowed the spread of worship in the Old Church Slavonic language. The Greek influence continued to until the Great Schism, when the Ruthenian (Rusyn) Church took sides, and became Orthodox.
Following the Mongol annihilation of Kiev in the 13th century, the Metropolitan of Kiev moved to Vladimir in 1299. By 1326, the Metropolitan had settled in Moscow, and by 1328 had changed the title of Metropolitan of Kiev for the title Metropolitan of Moscow. The separate legal tradition of the Ruthenian Church, as differentiated from the Church in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was codified in the decision of the first properly Russian Church Council of the Hundred Chapters ('Stoglav') in 1448, followed by the formal separation of the Church of Rus' into separate Russian (Muscovite) and Ruthenian (Kievan) Metropoliae in 1453.
This situation continued for some time, and in the intervening years what is now Western and Central Ukraine came under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish king Sigismund III Vasa was heavily influenced by the ideals of the Counter-Reformation and wanted to increase the Catholic presence in Ukraine. Meanwhile the clergy of the Ruthenian lands were ruled from distant Constantinople, and much of the population showed loyalty to Orthodoxy rather than the Catholic monarch. Persecution of the Orthodox population grew, and under pressure of Polish authorities the clergy of the Ruthenian Church agreed by the Union of Brest in 1595 to break from the Patriarch of Constantinopole and unite with the Catholic Church under the sponsorship of the ruler of the Commonwealth, Sigismund III Vasa, in response for ending the persecution. The union was not accepted by all the members of the Greek Church in these lands, and marked the beginning of the creation of separate Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches on the lands of Ukraine and Belarus. Due to violence, the Metropolitan of the Kievan Greek Catholic Church left Kiev early in the 17th century and settled in Navahrudak (present Belarus) and Vilna in Lithuania.
The final step of the full particularity of the Ukrainian Catholic Church was then effected by the development of the middle Ruthenian language into separate Rusyn, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages around 1600 to 1800. With Orthodoxy being largely suppressed during the two centuries of the Polish rule, the Greek-Catholic influence on the Ukrainian population was so great that in several oblasts hardly any remained Orthodox.
After the partition of Poland, the formerly Greek-Catholic territory was mostly divided between Russia and Austria. In the Russian partition, which included Volhynia and Podolia, in the easternmost areas of Podolia the population quickly and voluntarily returned to Orthodoxy. Initially, the Russian authorities were extremely tolerant of the Greek-Catholic church and allowed it to function (calling them Basilians). However immediately the clergy was split into pro-Catholic and pro-Russian, with the former tending to convert to Latin Rite Catholicism, whilst the demands of the latter group led by Bishop Iosif Semashko (1798–1868)[1] being firmly rejected by the ruling Greek-Catholic synod still largely controlled by the pro-Polish clergy with the Russian authorities largely refusing to interfere. The situation changed abruptly following Russia's successful suppression of the 1831 Polish uprising aimed at overthrowing the Russian control of the Polish territories. As the uprising was actively supported by the Greek-Catholic church, the crackdown on the Church became imminent. The pro-Latin members of the Synod were removed and the Church began to disintegrate with its parishes in Volhynia reverting to the Orthodoxy including the 1833 transfer of the famous Pochaiv Lavra. In 1839 the Synod of Polotsk (Modern Belarus), under the leadership of Bishop Semashko, dissolved the Greek-Catholic church in the Russian Empire, and all its property was transferred to the Orthodox state church. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia says that in what was then known as 'Little Russia' (now Ukraine), the pressure of the Russian Government "utterly wiped out" Greek Catholics, and "some 7,000,000 of the Uniats there were compelled, partly by force and partly by deception, to become part of the Russian Orthodox Church".[2]
The dissolution of the Greek-Catholic Church in Russia was complete in 1875 with the abolition of the Eparchy of Kholm.[3]
With the elimination of Ruthenian Catholics on the territory of the Russian Empire during the 19th century, the Pope of Rome granted the transfer of the quasi-patriarchal powers of the Major-Archiepiscopate of Kiev/Halych and all Rus to the Metropolitan of Lviv (Lemberg) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1803. Suffragan sees included Ivano-Frankivsk (then called Stanislav) and Przemyśl. By the end of the century, the faithful of this church began emigrating to the U.S., Canada, and Brazil.
In Austrian Polish partition that included Halychyna (modern Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and parts of Ternopil oblasts), the Greek-Catholic Ruthenian (Ukrainian) peasantry was largely under the Polish Latin Catholic domination. The Austrians granted equal legal privileges to the Greek-Catholic Church and removed Polish influence. They also mandated that Uniate seminarians receive a formal higher education (previously, priests had been educated informally by their fathers), and organized institutions in Vienna and Lviv that would serve this function. This led to the appearance, for the first time, of a large educated social class within the Ukrainian population in Halychyna.[4] It also engendered a fierce sense of loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty. When Polish rebels briefly took control of Lviv in 1809, they demanded that the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Anton Anhelovych, have his Church substitute Napoleon's name in the Divine Liturgy for that of Austrian Emperor Francis II. He refused, and was imprisoned by the Poles. When the Austrians retook control over the city, Anhelovych was awarded the cross of Leopold by the Emperor.[5]
As a result of the reforms, within Austrian Halychyna over the next century the Greek-Catholic Church ceased being a puppet of foreign interests and became the primary cultural force within the Ukrainian community. Most independent native Ukrainian cultural and political trends (such as Rusynophilia, Russophilia and later Ukrainophilia) emerged from within the ranks of the Greek-Catholic Church clergy. The participation of Greek Catholic priests or their children in western Ukrainian cultural and political life was so great that western Ukrainians were accused of wanting to create a theocracy in western Ukraine by their Polish rivals.[6] Among the political trends emerging from the priests of their families, the Christian social movement was particularly linked to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. For many people, the Austrians were seen as having saved the Ukrainians and their Church from the Poles.
Ukrainian Greek Catholics found themselves under the governance of the nations of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia after World War I. Under the previous century of Austrian rule, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church attained such a strong Ukrainian national character that in the interwar Poland, the Greek Catholics of Galicia were seen by the nationalist Polish and Catholic state as even less reliable than the Orthodox Volhynians. Carrying its Polonisation policies throughout its Eastern Territories, the Polish authorities sought to weaken the UGCC in various ways. In 1924, following a visit with the Ukrainian Catholic believers in North America and western Europe, the head of the UGCC was initially denied reentry to Lviv only being allowed back after a considerable delay. Polish (Latin Rite) Roman Catholic priests, led by their Latin bishops, began to undertake missionary work among Greek Catholics, and administrative restrictions were placed on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.[8]
The aftermath of World War II placed almost all native Ukrainian Catholics under the rule of the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc which, using the positions of only a few ex-UGCC leading clergymen, tried to gain control over the Church. Soviet documents of 1945 indicates a collaboration between Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Patriarch Alexy I of Moscow to dismantle the Greek Catholic Church in the then recently-annexed western areas of Ukrainian SSR.[9]
These dissident ex-UGCC clergy called a (Soviet-supervised) "synod" (Lviv Sobor of 1946) in Lviv and at this synod annulled the Union of Brest of 1596 and all of its statutes. Ex-UGCC priest Havryil Kostelnyk (who later died under dubious circumstances) was forced or convinced to preside over this Lviv Sobor of 1946, probably due to blackmailing by the Soviet NKVD and other secret services. Ironically, as all the bishops of the UGCC were at this point either in prison or exile, no bishops of the UGCC were involved (there were 216 priests and 19 laymen present instead[10]), making the supposed synod or sobor canonically illegitimate by the official canons of both Orthodox and Catholic Churches alike. Whilst officially all of the church property was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, some Ukrainian Greek Catholic clergy went underground. This catacomb church was strongly supported by the diaspora created by the mass emigration to the Western hemisphere, which had begun already in the 1870s and increased at the end of World War II.
In the winter of 1944-45, Catholic clergy were summoned to 'reeducation' sessions conducted by the NKVD. Near the end of the war in Europe, the state media began an anti-Catholic campaign.[10] The creation of the community in 1596 was discredited in publications that would later appear, which went to great pains to try to prove that the Catholic Church was conducting activities directed against Ukrainians in the first half of the 20th century.[10]
In 1945 Soviet authorities arrested, deported and sentenced to forced labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere the church's metropolitan Yosyf Slipyi and nine other Greek Catholic bishops, as well as hundreds of clergy and leading lay activists. All the above-mentioned bishops and significant part of clergymen died in prisons, concentration camps, internal exile, or soon after their release during the post-Stalin thaw.[11] The exception was metropolitan Yosyf Slipyi who, after 18 years of imprisonment and persecution, was released thanks to the intervention of Pope John XXIII, arrived in Rome, where he received the title of Major Archbishop of Lviv, and became cardinal in 1965.[11] In Lvov alone, 800 priests were imprisoned.[10]
For the clergy that joined the Russian Orthodox Church, the Soviet authorities refrained from the large-scale persecution of religion that was seen elsewhere in the country (see Religion in the Soviet Union). In the city of Lviv, only one church was closed (at a time when many cities in the rest of Ukraine did not have a working church). Moreover, the western dioceses of Lviv-Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk were the largest in the USSR, holding the majority of the Russian Orthodox Church's cloisters (particularly convents, of which there were seven in Ukrainian SSR but none in Russia). Orthodox canon law was also relaxed on the clergy allowing them to shave beards (a practice uncommon to Orthodoxy) and conduct liturgy in Ukrainian as opposed to Church Slavonic.
The Ukrainian Catholics continued to exist underground for decades and were the subject of vigorous attacks in the state media. The clergy gave up public exercise of their clerical duties, but secretly provided services for many lay people.[10] Many priests took up civilian professions and celebrated the sacraments in private. The identities of former priests could have been known to the Soviet police who regularly watched them, interrogated them and put fines on them, but stopped short of arrest unless their activities went beyond a small circle of people.[10] New secretly ordained priests were often treated more harshly.[10]
The church even grew during this time, and this was acknowledged by Soviet sources. The first secretary of the Lvov Komsomol, Oleksiy Babiychuk, claimed:
in this oblast, particularly in the rural areas, a large number of the population adheres to religious practices, among them a large proportion of youth. In the last few years, the activity of the Uniates [Ukrainian Catholics] has grown, that of representatives of the Uniates as well as former Uniate priests; there are even reverberations to renew the overt activity of this Church.[10]
After Stalin died, Ukrainian Catholics hoped this would lead to better conditions for themselves, but such hopes were dashed in the late 50s when the authorities arrested even more priests and unleashed a new wave of anti-Catholic propaganda.[10] Secret ordinations occurred in exile. Secret theological seminaries in Ternopol and Kolomyia were reported in the Soviet press in the 1960s when their organizers were arrested.[10] In 1974 a clandestine convent was uncovered in Lvov.[10]
During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church did flourish throughout the Ukrainian diaspora. Cardinal Yosyf Slipyi was jailed as a dissident but named in pectore (in secret) a cardinal in 1949; he was freed in 1963 and was the subject of an extensive campaign to have him named as a patriarch, which met with strong support as well as controversy. Pope Paul VI demurred, but compromised with the creation of a new title of major archbishop, with a jurisdiction roughly equivalent to that of a patriarch in an Eastern church. This title has since passed to Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky in 1984 and thereafter to Lubomyr Husar in 2000 and Sviatoslav Shevchuk in 2011; this title has also been granted to the heads of three other Eastern Catholic Churches.
In 1968, when the Ukrainian Catholic Church was legalized in Czechoslovakia, a large scale campaign was launched to harass recalcitrant clergy who remained illegal.[10] These clergy were subject to interrogations, fines and beatings. In January 1969 the KGB arrested an underground Catholic bishop named Vasyl Velychkovsy and two Catholic priests, and sentenced them to three years of imprisonment for breaking anti-religious legislation.[10]
Activities that could lead to arrest included holding religious services, educating children as Catholics, performing baptisms, conducting weddings or funerals, hearing confessions or giving the last rites, copying religious materials, possessing prayer books, possessing icons, possessing church calendars, possessing religious books or other sacred objects.[10] Conferences were held to discuss how to perfect the methodology in combatting Ukrainian Catholicism in the West Ukraine.[10]
At times the Ukrainian Catholics attempted to employ legal channels to have their community recognized by the state. In 1956-1957 there were petitions to the proper authorities to request for churches to be opened. More petitions were sent in the 60s and 70s, all of which were refused. In 1976, a priest named Volodymyr Prokipov was arrested for presenting such a petition to Moscow.[10] The response to these petitions by the state had been to sharpen attacks against the community.
In 1984 a samizdat Chronicle of the Catholic Church began to be published by Ukrainian Catholics. The founder of the group behind this publication, Yosef Terelya, was arrested in 1985 and sentenced to 7 years imprisonment and 5 years of exile.[10] His successor, Vasely Kobryn, was arrested and sentenced to 3 years of exile.[10]
The solidarity movement in Poland and Pope John Paul II supported the Ukrainian Catholics. The state media attacked John Paul II. The antireligious journal Liudyna i Svit (Man and the World) published in Kiev wrote:
Proof that the Church is persistently striving to strengthen its political influence in socialist countries is witnessed by the fact that Pope John Paul II gives his support to the emigre hierarchy of the so-called Ukrainian Catholic Church . . .. The current tactic of Pope John Paul II and the Roman Curia lies in the attempts to strengthen the position of the Church in all socialist countries as they have done in Poland, where the Vatican tried to raise the status of the Catholic Church to a state within a state. In the last few years, the Vatican has paid particular attention to the question of Catholicism of the Slavonic nations. This is poignantly underscored by the Pope when he states that he is not only a Pope of Polish origin, but the first Slavic Pope, and he will pay particular attention to the Christianization of all Slavic nations.[10]
By the late 1980s there was a shift in the Soviet government's attitude towards religion. At the height of Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization reforms, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church emerged from the catacombs to find itself largely in disarray with the nearly all of its pre-1946 parishes and property lost to the Orthodox faith. The church, actively supported by nationalist organisations such as Rukh and later the UNA-UNSO, took an uncompromising stance towards the return of its lost property and parishes. According to a Greek-Catholic priest, "even if the whole village is now Orthodox and one person is Greek Catholic, the church [building] belongs to that Catholic because the church was built by his grandparents and great-grandparents."[12] The weakened Soviet authorities were unable to pacify the situation, and most of the parishes in Halychyna came under the control of the Greek-Catholics during the events of a large scale interconfessional rivalry that was often accompanied by violent clashes of the faithful provoked by their religious and political leadership.[13] These tensions led to a rupture of relations between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Vatican.
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Currently the church has between 3 and 5 million supporters in Ukraine. Numerous surveys conducted since the late 1990s consistently show that between 6% and 8% of Ukraine's total population, or 9.4% to 12.6% of the country's religious believers, identify themselves as belonging to this Church.[14] Worldwide, the faithful now number some 6 to 10 million, forming the largest particular Catholic Church, after the majority Latin Rite Church. Within Ukraine, the Greek Catholic Church is increasing at the expense of the majority Orthodox Church, due to higher birth rates and lower death rates among its members (see Demographics of Ukraine).
Today, most Ukrainian Catholic Churches have moved away from Church Slavonic and use Ukrainian. Many churches also offer liturgies in the official language of the country the Church is in, for example, German in Germany or English in Canada; however, some parishes continue to celebrate the liturgy in Slavonic even today, and services in a mix of languages are not unusual.
In the early first decade of the 21st century, construction began for the transfer of the major see of the Ukrainian Catholic Church back to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. However, this move remains controversial for some Ukrainian Catholics, who view Lviv in Western Ukraine as the true stronghold of Ukrainian Catholicism, having supported and protected the Ukrainian Catholic Church through long periods of persecution. Moving the Ukrainian Catholic Church to Kiev, therefore, has taken on political overtones in the Church. The move tends to be supported by those people who favour the appointment of a Ukrainian Catholic Patriarch to oversee the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
In 2001 a priest, Vasyl Kovpak, and a small group of followers opposed to certain policies (such as de-latinisation) and ecumenism of the UGCC hierarchy, organized themselves as the Priestly Society of Saint Josaphat. The PSSJ possesses close ties with the Latin Rite Traditionalist Catholic Society of Saint Pius X, which rejects and condemns certain actions and policies of both Husar and the Pope. On November 21, 2007 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith excommunicated Kovpak.[15]
In 2008, a group of Basilian priests at the Pidhirtsi monastery declared that four of them had been consecrated bishops without permission of the Pope or the Major Archbishop. The "Pidhirtsi fathers" had opposed de-latinisation, liberal theology, and the ecumenical approach of the hierarchy. Excommunicated in 2008, in 2009 they constituted themselves as the Ukrainian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church moved its administrative center from Western Ukrainian Lviv to a new cathedral in Kiev on 21 August 2005. The title of the head of the UGCC was changed from The Major Archbishop of Lviv to The Major Archbishop of Kyiv and Halych.
The Patriarchal Curia of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church is an organ of His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the UGCC, Major Archbishop of Kyiv and Halych, which coordinates and promotes the common activity of the UGCC in Ukraine to make influence on society in different spheres: education, policy, culture, etc. The Curia develops action of the Church's structures, enables relations and cooperation with other Churches and major public institutions in religious and social areas for implementation of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church through everyday life.
The current eparchies and other territorial jurisdictions of the church are:
* Directly subject to the Holy See
As of 2008, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is estimated to have 4,284,082 faithful, 43 bishops, 4175 parishes, 2657 diocesan priests, 379 religious-order priests, 842 men religious, 1547 women religious, 113 deacons, and 692 seminarians.[16]
In contemporary Ukraine prison ministry of chaplains does not exist de jure. The prison pastoral care was at the very heart of the spirituality of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church throughout her history. Prison Pastoral of the UGCC, though it is still very young, is taking successive steps to integrity. It was restored in 1990 after the Church, formerly forbidden, emerged from the underground. Pastoral care has grown steadily from several establishments in the Western Part of Ukraine to more than 40 penal institutions in every region of the country. Since 2001 the UGCC is the co-founder of the Ukrainian Interdenominational Christian Mission "Spiritual and Charitable Care in Prisons" including twelve Churches and Denominations. This Mission is a part of the World Association of Prison Ministry. The most active prison chaplains are the Redemptorist Fathers.
In the year 2006 His Beatitude Lubomyr Husar established in the Patriarchal Curia of the UGCC the Department for Pastoral Care in the Armed Forces and in the Penitentiary System of Ukraine. This structure implements a general management of Prison Ministry. The chief of the Department is Most Rev. Michael Koltun, Bishop of Sokal and Zhovkva. The head of the Unit for penitentiary pastoral care is Rev. Constantin Panteley, who is directly responsible for coordination of activity in this realm. He is in direct contact with 37 priests in 12 eparchies who have been assigned responsibility for prison pastoral care. Those pastors ensure regular attendance of penitentiary facilities, investigatory isolators and prisons.
Department of the UGCC for Pastoral Care in the Armed Forces and in the Penitentiary System of Ukraine is provisory structure till both chaplaincies will be quite ripe. Prison Pastoral Care is appealed to facilitate transition from the punitive system neglecting human dignity to correctional system cherishing penitentiary idea. Our mission is to serve the inmates in the national penitentiaries with Christian charity and reconciliation through extensive ministry to the spiritual and physical needs of prisoners of any creed, sex, age, religious faith, or nationality. The priority directions of the ministry are sermon, catechetics, administration of the sacraments for inmates, assistance and support of communication with family, spiritual support of the prison stuff, engagement of lay people in ministry.
The Sunday of the Prodigal Son, which every year falls up to date two weeks before the Great Lent, Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has defined as a Day of special pastoral attention and prayer for prisoners themselves and the other victims of crimes. The Gospel Reading on this Sunday (Luke 15:11-32) lays out one of the most important themes of the Lenten season: the history of falling into a sin, realization of one's sinfulness, the road to repentance, and finally reconciliation, each of which is illustrated in the course of the parable. The UGCC Synod invokes to remember in prayers workers of the Penitentiary system of Ukraine, who perform difficult tasks, because every day they are near of broken human destinies. This Sunday declared as a day to remember in prayers and support chaplains and volunteers, who work with great dedication to provide spiritual support for prisoners, helping them to step on the right path.
The UGCC Prison Ministry has many directions of development in compatibility with other missions of the Church. It is currently carrying out on the base of "The Agreement for cooperation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church with the State Penal Department of Ukraine", which offers many possibilities. Today pastoral ministry is regularly carried out in penitentiary facilities # 3, 13, 27, 30, 40, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50, 55, 57, 63, 110, 112, 120, 124, in correctional centres # 118, 128, 135 in seven investigatory isolators and in three juvenile prisons of Ukraine. In 6 prisons our pastors are able to attend only irregularly.