Background analysis of Christianity in Ukraine reveals religious persecution
By John F. Fink
Ukraine is in the news these days, as Russia tries to take over the Crimean peninsula in the southwest region of the country. Here is what readers should know about religion in Ukraine.
It’s believed that the Apostle St. Andrew preached in Ukraine, erecting a cross on a hill overlooking present-day Kiev in the year 55. Today the large St. Andrew’s Church, with its green dome, is built on that site.
Crimea is important in Christian history because two popes might have been exiled there. There is the tradition that Pope Clement I was exiled there in 101, and we know that Pope Martin I was exiled there in 654. He died there in 655.
However, the firm establishment of Christianity didn’t occur until 988, when Prince Vladimir, the ruler of Kievan-Rus in what is now Ukraine, and thousands of his subjects, were baptized in the Dnieper River.
After Vladimir’s baptism, Greek missionaries Christianized Russia. The Soviet Union celebrated 1,000 years of Christianity in 1988.
Monasteries played an important role in Kiev. Pecherskii Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, founded by St. Antony around 1051, is a big tourist attraction today. Visitors walk down through the caves where monks once lived; some of their mummified bodies are still there.
The Criterion sponsored a trip to the Soviet Union, including a stop in Kiev, in September of 1988. It was a much different place then. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church operated clandestinely with underground priests and bishops, and had done so since Joseph Stalin’s bloodbath against the Catholic Church in 1946, after World War II.
Under the Soviets, large numbers of Ukrainian Catholics suffered long prison terms or martyrdom for their faith. Robert Royal devotes a 21-page chapter to “The Terror in Ukraine” in his book The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.
In trying to eliminate the Catholic Church, Stalin confiscated all of its 4,119 churches and chapels and gave them to the Orthodox Church, the only Church recognized by the Soviet government. A Church with more than 4 million adherents was suddenly eliminated from public life. Royal says that the Ukrainian Catholic Church under the Soviets was the largest suppressed group of believers in the world.
That has all changed. The Ukrainian government restored the Catholic Church’s legal status in 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has 3,317 parishes for about 7 percent of Ukraine’s population. There is also a smaller Latin-rite Catholic community with 713 churches. The Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church also exists in Transcarpathia.
Most Ukrainian Christians, however, belong to one of three Orthodox churches: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kiev Patriarchate), and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Of them, only the first is in full communion with the worldwide Orthodox Church.
The re-emergence of the Catholic Church after the collapse of the Soviet Union created problems with the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The Greek Catholics were accused of seizing more than 1,000 Orthodox churches. The Catholics, of course, believe that they only recovered the churches that were taken by Stalin and given to the Orthodox. Relations between the Orthodox and the Catholics in Ukraine have not been pleasant.
Soon-to-be St. John Paul II traveled to Ukraine for five days in 2001 to try to improve those poor relations. About 200,000 people attended his liturgies in Kiev, and his Mass in Lviv attracted nearly 1.5 million people. Christian unity was one of his top priorities.
The Orthodox Churches frequently become involved in Ukrainian politics. For example, during the 2004 presidential election, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) supported Viktor Yanukovych while the other churches supported Viktor Yushchenko. Since then, of course, Yanukovych, who won that election, has been deposed and escaped to Russia.
As this is being written, there are reports that the Catholic Church is being forced out of Crimea after the referendum in which 96.77 percent of the voters voted for Crimea to rejoin Russia. Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests have received threats warning them to leave Crimea, and three of them were reported missing.
(John F. Fink is editor emeritus of The Criterion.) †