The Glory of the Patriarch

Part II in the continuing story of Josyf Cardinal Slipyi

by Maurice de Nessy

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

With grateful acknowledgement to Fideliter Magazine

On February 9, 1963, limping on a frozen foot, Josyf Slipyi disembarked from the aircraft at Rome's Fiumicino airport. Hardly anyone was there to greet him, just a few monsignori and, representing the Italian government, Signer Andreotti, who murmured to the metropolitans, "What a world, where they won't honor the persecuted for fear of the persecutors!" For Moscow's conditions had been strict: no publicity and no ceremonies. This fugitive from hell was to go straight into obscurity, hopefully to die there before long!

In his Spiritual Testament, the Metropolitan recalls: "During the flight, despite the joy of being free, the pain in my heart gave me no respite as I thought of our Church and our people. All that they had built up in a thousand years and thirty generations now lay in ruins. But I accepted it as the expression of God's will, for nothing achieved in a people's history is pointless, and no suffering is in vain..."

It took several months of intensive medical treatment to restore him to a state of health that eighteen years of forced labor had seriously impaired, but already the fighting spirit of the confessor bishop was in evidence. He made known in no uncertain terms his opinion of the presence as guests of honor at Vatican II of two officials of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose church was directly responsible for the persecution, murder and disappearance of so many of the Ukrainian clergy and people. The Vatican tried to placate him by granting him the titles of senior Metropolitan of Kiev and Lviv, and attaching him to the Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Church. Then, later, on January 25, 1965, Pope Paul VI, at his first consistory, created him a cardinal. (His elevation in petto by John XXIII had never been made known.)

The Presence of the Leader

As soon as his health permitted he was summoned to the Vatican Council, where his presence in the front row commanded immediate attention. Thunderous applause greeted this physical and moral giant as he formally saluted his fellow-bishops. All the commentators on the Council have described the Ukrainian Rite Litury which the fifteen Ukrainian Catholic bishops of the free world celebrated together with the Metropolitan on October 11, 1963. Mgr. Slipyi himself made a striking declaration upon that occasion: "It was for me," he said, "the testimony of the Ukrainian Church; the testimony of its faith in Christ, and of its one, holy, synodical and apostolic character, a testimony based on a bloody martyrdom, on an intrepid confession of the Faith in the face of suffering, torture and all the ills which have befallen our immolated people. In order to express our gratitude before the whole world, and to make known our solidarity with those still suffering and to strengthen their morale, I have made a suggestion and a request to the Vatican, that the Metropolitan See of Kiev-Galicia should be raised to the dignity of a Patriarchate."

This project, of which we shall speak more later, was very close to his heart, and it was a source of great sadness to him that he was never able to realize it.

His experiences with the Russian Orthodox Church were the inspiration of his many attacks on the false ecumenism which spread throughout the Church in the wake of the Council. Thus, for example, he castigated the attitude of the Vatican delegates to the 1971 Moscow Synod when they remained silent in the face of Patriarch Pimen's renewal of Patriarch Alexis's solemn annulment of the ancient union between Rome and the Ukrainian Church. Pimen did not fail to notice that Rome was no longer protecting this union. Both in private and in public the Metropolitan of Lviv, like Cardinal Wyszynski,¹ complained that Roman diplomats (notably Mgr. Poggie) were negotiating with the persecutors of the Church without reference to their victims. Cardinal Slipyi never failed to condemn this duplicity, but he was big-hearted enough to empathize with the misfortunes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had been officially recognized by the state from 1917 to 1939. In fact it was abolished by Stalin in 1929, and it, too, was forcibly integrated into the Patriarchate of Moscow, the ruthless collaborator of Communist tyranny. Several times in Rome he took in refugee prelates from this Church, who had no funds and nowhere to go, and thus by establishing bonds of charity he paved the way for a true unity in the future.

He had made up his mind to be present everywhere he could effectively make his message heard, and thus in November 1977, when the "Sakharov Tribunal," formed for the defense of human rights, met in Rome, the Metropolitan, wearing the majestic robes of his office appeared unexpectedly to speak on behalf of his martyred people. He was received by the famous Russian dissident Leonid Pliuch, himself an atheist, who stated significantly: "Believers or non-believers, we support the fight of Catholics to restore human dignity. Your life and sufferings are for us an example to be followed in the gulags and the psychiatric hospitals so that the spirit may survive." Cardinal Slipyi's reply expressed clearly his position and his message: "I have come here for two reasons. You are giving evidence of the religious persecution in the U.S.S.R. and in my homeland, the Ukraine. My Church is among the victims of this persecution. I am its leader and its father, so I must defend and protect it. I have been in slavery. I have seen from the inside what a fellow-slave, Solzhenitsyn, has called the 'Gulag Archipelago,' and I carry on my body the scars of those horrors. For sixty years my people have been suffering hardship and persecution, both religious and national. The Catholic Church in the Ukraine has been destroyed by the terror of the secret police, by torture, by imprisonment..."

The Metropolitan went on to give the doleful statistics: "All our bishops have died in prison or in exile except the one now speaking to you. Fifteen hundred of our priests must have been shot or otherwise put to death. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Catholics have been deported to the gulags, and many of them are there still. In the territories occupied by the U.S.S.R. during the Second World War we used to have three thousand and forty parishes, with four thousand, five hundred and ninety-five churches and chapels. Today there is no longer even a single monastery or religious house, no Catholic school, no seminary. All pastoral ministry is forbidden. All church buildings have been confiscated, closed, destroyed, or stolen by the Russian Orthodox Church.² As a living witness, who has shared in the sufferings of the Church of which I am the Patriarch, and have survived the martyrdom of my spiritual children, I have intervened a number of times in defense of the Faith and of Ukrainian believers. That is what I am doing here today. My office and the pleas of my people in the catacombs oblige me to give evidence before this tribunal so that the world and history may hear from me also the injustices, the oppression, the violence and the crimes committed against the human rights of my people... the will of God has been trampled underfoot along with justice. Both must be restored and the rights of men re-established."

This magnificent piece of Christian oratory needed to be quoted at some length as an echo of the cries of the convict laborers in Siberia, of whom Cardinal Slipyi had been one for eighteen years; being moved from gulag to gulag, he had traveled more than five thousand miles. He had to speak, nay, to cry out... but his effort was wasted. The persecution continued to steam-roller its bloody way forward.³

The Metropolitan's policy of maintaining an active presence led him to intervene each time that dissidents or Jewish "refuseniks"⁴ were brought to trial. In particular he took up the causes of Alexander Ginsberg, Victor Petkus and Anatoly Sharansky (released in February 1986), issuing a "message to the world" in their defense (1978). In this he stated: "They have the courage to proclaim that the rights of man are mocked in the U.S.S.R., where the courts, instead of defending justice, protect criminals... Those who cause falsehood to triumph commit a crime against God, against history and against humanity."

And so Metropolitan Josyf Slipyi, whom the militant atheists of the U.S.S.R. had thought to reduce to a mere vegetable became little by little the loud hailer of the Faith and of Christian resistance. Even in Rome he was a thorn in the flesh to some. More than one Vatican official would have liked to see him safely out of the way in some Eastern Rite monastery, lost in the silent contemplation of eternal verities, but alas for such people, he carried right on speaking out, and what is more, he began to build!

The Ukrainian Vatican

Archbishop Slipyi had realized when he reached Rome (as later would Cardinal Mindszenty) that he risked being wrapped in cotton wool and silenced if he did not establish for himself a multi-purpose residence where he could speak and write as he pleased. For that he needed money. He knew how to get the interest of Ukrainian emigrants to the U.S.A. Many of these had become wealthy by their ability in textile manufacture and in the setting up and running of supermarkets. His trust proved justified, for these people were never to fail him. He started by founding a small convent, which soon grew, and a Ukrainian Centre to disseminate information on the life of Ukrainian dioceses around the world, and on the heroic advance of the Underground Church. He also provided funds to help set Ukrainian emigrés up in business and to transmit Ukrainian programs on Radio Free World, which broadcasts to Iron Curtain countries from Munich and West Berlin.

Then, because the Ukrainian clergy were his principal concern, he decided upon and built the Pontifical Ruthenian (i.e., Ukrainian) Seminary under the protection of the Vatican State. This seminary made possible in Rome itself the advanced theological education of the best candidates from the fifteen Ukrainian dioceses in the Free World. There, at the very center of Christianity they were to be enabled at every step to live the history of their faith, from the catacombs right up to the huge, ultra-modern audience hall at the Vatican, while remaining both profoundly Ukrainian and Catholic in the fullest sense.

However, the Metropolitan soon discovered that the formation being given to his seminarians was based entirely on Latin Christianity, and that they risked losing their own distinctive identity. Therefore, on December 8, 1963, he founded the Ukainian Roman Catholic University of St. Clement in the Via Boccea. In this way, Mgr. Slipyi "adopted" the third successor of St. Peter, St. Clement of Rome. In 96 A.D. during the persecution of Trajan, this Pope was deported to the Crimea along with two thousand other Christians to work in the marble quarries there. He died there in 98 A.D. The Metropolitan's inspired idea was thus to "go behind" the official introduction of Christianity to the Ukraine by St. Vladimir the Great in 988 and quite simply to go back to the first century with the arrival of exiled Christians from Rome. Inevitably there were complaints from the Moscow Patriarchate. In his Spiritual Testament Cardinal Slipyi defined the vital role of his university: "Atheism having become the official doctrine in the Ukraine and in all the other countries of the Communist world, I charge you to safeguard the Ukrainian Catholic University, for it is the crucible in which future generations of priests and lay apostles of Christ, the future fighters for truth and unconstrained learning will study and be formed."

Because the life of the Church, however active and prosperous it may be, is based primarily on the spiritual life, the visible face of the supernatural, Archbishop Slipyi wanted to provide his Ukrainian Center with monks and nuns devoted to prayer and to providing a channel for Divine Providence. His first recruits were the Basilian nuns from the Aventine, Ukrainian religious who had escaped from the Communists amid long hardships. The Metropolitan presided over several of their chapters. Then he founded a monastery of Studites at Grottaferrata, near Albano, which Pope Paul VI officially recognized on August 1, 1965. The Studites are an eastern religious order founded in Constantinople about 800 A.D. by St. Theodorus the Studite, who was noted for his defense of the Holy Images against the iconoclasts. "This abbey is one of the pillars of my Church," said the Metropolitan.

But the most notable achievement of his apostolate in exile was the great Sveta Sofia Sobor, the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, built near the university and other of the Metropolitan's foundations. A great church in pure Ukrainian style, with its five gilded domes and semi-cylindrical roofs, it was built between 1967 and 1969. The interior is sober, but the iconostasis is richly decorated, and from the icons on the walls the figures look out with a mysterious intensity. The building was consecrated on September 27, 1969, and the following day Paul VI took there the relics of St. Clement, brought back from the Crimea by Ss. Cyril and Methodius. As a special favor he took also a stone from the tomb of St. Peter, discovered in 1950 beneath the Vatican Basilica.

Nonetheless, as Cardinal Slipyi often said, this Roman cathedral is but a replica and a reminder of the splendid cathedral of the Holy Wisdom in Kiev, the religious metropolis and the historic capital of the Ukraine. This eighteenth century church, built on the site of an original of the eleventh century, has been secularized by the Soviets, and it has to be admitted that it has been very well maintained, albeit as an "archaeological museum," with its green and white painted walls surmounted by gilded domes. It attracts many visitors, and of course is flanked by a "museum of atheism" where the history of the "Goddess Mary" through the ages is recounted.

There was already in Rome a Rutheno-Ukrainian College, with large buildings centered on the Church of Ss. Sergius and Bacchus, in which was venerated the miraculous Virgin known as "Our Lady of the Pasture." Pope Clement VIII had given the icon to the Metropolitan of Kiev in 1795. Due to years of neglect all these buildings were falling into ruin when Metropolitan Slipyi decided to buy them and make them into a junior seminary and secondary school. All his efforts were centered on the generations to come: he wanted to establish solid foundations for the time when Ukrainians would recover the civic liberty to live once more in their own country and to profess there the faith of their Catholic forefathers.

To these various foundations, which he provided with all the material necessities, libraries, printing shops, study-rooms, etc., the Metropolitan entrusted the revision and reprinting of the biblical, liturgical, theological, canonical and mystical texts of the Ukainian Church. This huge undertaking was naturally coordinated by the University of St. Clement, whose rector, Fr. Ivan Chomas, is a specialist in Ukrainian thought and literature. He told us of his bitterness at discovering that "there are all too few French authors writing about the religious and cultural genocide in the Ukraine." We hope that this article will do something to appease him.

These, then, are some aspects of the manifold, impressive and truly grandiose activities of Metropolitan Slipyi after he had survived eighteen years of physical and moral torture, of sickness and consuming diseases that brought him time and again to the very gates of death. But this is not the end—there are greater things yet to come.

1. Cardinal Mindszenty once refused to receive a Vatican delegation which had come to negotiate with the Communist government in Warsaw without consulting him first.

2. We have already had occasion to mention, several times, the criminal acts of the Russian Orthodox authorities against the Ukainian Catholic Church. The patriarchs Alexis and Pimen behaved as vile accomplices of atheistic Communism, thieves under the protection of brigands. They took possession of the Cathedral of St. George, seat of the Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan of Lviv, while their Communist masters were demolishing the popular pilgrimage basilica of Zarvanytsia: maybe they rejoiced when the Dominican church in Lviv and the church at Yaremche in the Carpathians were turned in to anti-religious atheistic museums... In the face of this persecution, a veritable spiritual genocide, only timid comments were made at the U.N., in the West generally, and notably, in Rome itself. At the World Council of (Protestant and Orthodox) Churches in Nairobi (1982) and Vancouver (1985) a few courageous voices were raised to demand an intervention. Immediately the Russian bishops and officials violently and rowdily opposed any criticism of the Soviets. There is obviously no shortage of ecclesiastical flunkies in that part of the world!

3. Ukrainian Catholics are not the only victims of Soviet genocide. In 1942 there were the 1,800,000 Germans of the Volga, allowed to live there by Catherine the Great for their defense of Eastern Russia; in 1946 the 1,200,000 Tartars of the Crimea, and 400,000 Lithuanians were evicted from their homes. Those who ended up in northern Yakutsk, or around Lake Baikal still have descendants in the area who are still faithful, as far as possible, to the old religious practices and to their ancient icons, as French visitors have been able to verify.

4. "Refuseniks": Jews refused permission to emigrate to Israel. There are about 70,000 of them, and their stubborn insistence often leads them to end up in the gulags.