Part III in the story of the Patriarch of the Ukrainian Church

By Maurice de Nessy

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Having anchored the Roman Centre of the Ukrainian Church solidly to the foundation of the Apostles, Metropolitan Slipyi set about reorganising and revitalising his Church-in-Exile. There are three and a half million Ukrainians spread around the world, and two-thirds of them are Catholic. He aimed at a clergy strongly united among themselves and effectively bound to the underground church in their homeland. A Ukrainian hierarchy existed, but without much organisation, and more or less subject to the local Latin Rite Authorities, who knew little about the Ukrainian Church and mentality, and who handled Ukrainian affairs ineptly or not at all, sometimes completely ignoring these troublesome and noisy "Easterns" or "Russians." But from 1963 onwards the Ukrainian Church had a leader, and one who was no weakling or "whinger."

His first concern was to set the hierarchy on a solid footing. There were fifteen bishops; three in the USA, five in Canada, one each in Brazil, Argentina, Australia, France, Germany, and England; and one with general responsibility for Europe. Under these bishops were eleven hundred priests, assisted by the ardent voluntary services of trained laymen. The Metropolitan was not one to simply sit in an office making decisions and dispatching mail; he had no interest in paperwork. He had to be on the spot, seeing for himself, discussing, arguing, deciding. He began 1963 by inspecting the Ukrainian parishes in Sicily. Then followed numerous other pastoral visits to North and South America, to Australia and New Zealand, then in 1969-70 to Austria, Germany, England, Spain and France. At Lourdes he recalled that nearly all the Siberian convict labourers whom he had been able to assist in their last moments on this earth had called upon their Heavenly Mother, so deeply were the memories of childhood rooted in them, when their earthly mothers had taught them to pray each night before the icon of the Panaghia (the All-Holy One) [The word is feminine, so there is no danger of confusion with the Deity, but of course this won't go into English translation]. In 1976 he made a very long trip, taking in Canada, the USA, Holland, Germany, and more.

Everywhere he brought order, advice, and material help to local Ukrainian initiatives, for his personality and the notoriety of his sufferings for Christ brought him most generous offerings from Ukrainians already established and prospering in commerce in the Free World. These gifts permitted him to establish, among other things, his numerous foundations and student scholarships.

But all the time he insisted on religious publications—a Ukrainian Bible for children, handy-sized prayer books—Byzantine liturgical books form a virtual library all on their own! The generosity of the faithful also enabled him to make religious radio broadcasts and somehow to send parcels into the communist-run Ukraine.

Back in Rome he convoked regular synods of his bishops to strengthen their fidelity to the Catholic Church of Christ, and to insist upon their place and their role within it. These gatherings also provided an opportunity to sort out difficulties, and above all, each time, to call upon the whole of Christendom to recognise the Ukrainian Patriarchate with its rights and its thousand-year Christian tradition. At the 1980 synod, Cardinal Slipyi had news of three clandestine bishops in the U.S.S.R. The synod of 1985, which took place after the death of the cardinal, was especially important, and the pope underlined this at an audience on October 5th of that year. Immediately, the Orthodox bishop Philaret of Kiev denounced "the Vatican's plans to use the Uniates as a means of unity with the Orthodox." This spokesman for the Kremlin, who delivered the leaders of the underground Catholic Church to the K.G.B. may have forgotten the Gospel, but he has forgotten nothing of hate and contempt.

The Underground Church

Metropolitan Slipyi's consuming zeal was not of course only for his Church and compatriots in the Free World. He was naturally every bit as concerned with those he had left behind on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and whose persecutions and sufferings he had shared in fullest measure. First of all he took every opportunity to lift the heavily opaque veil which the Soviets had drawn over the drama of their occupation of the Ukraine, for had not he himself lived through this drama? Misfortune had made him bold, and as he had broken down the barrier of fear, so now he set about shattering that of ignorance. Each time he raised his voice in public he spoke of the martyrdom of the Ukraine at the hands of the Soviets. In 1974, when Mgr. Achille Silvestrini went to represent the Holy See at the Belgrade conference on the results of the Helsinki Agreement, Cardinal Slipyi requested that he "demand greater freedom for oriental-rite Catholics living in Eastern Europe." In the event Mgr. Silvestrini made no specific mention of the Ukraine, but simply said: "It is a grievous wound to the Catholic Church, and all the more hurtful in that it affects a vital aspect of religious life."¹

In 1976 Cardinal Slipyi officially approached President Carter and Kurt Waldheim, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, with the request that this organization, supposed to be the guardian of the rights of man proclaimed at San Francisco in 1946, should take in hand the interests of the Ukraine. He received smiling assurances but nothing more: the U.S.S.R. was to remain above suspicion!  

It was a great joy for Cardinal Slipyi when he received a visit from Bishop Vassyl Velychovsky, who had been secretly consecrated for the see of Lousk in 1963, then imprisoned, but his sentence commuted to exile in 1972. He also was an invaluable witness for the Ukrainian Church, but sadly was to die prematurely in Winnipeg, Canada in 1973.

The sum of his misfortunes had impelled the Metropolitan to ask to speak at the 1971 Synod of Bishops, and he did not mince his words:

"Our Church", he said, "has been destroyed in blood. After the arrest of the entire hierarchy it was forcibly incorporated into the (schismatic) Orthodox Church, and this grave injustice has still not been remedied. Ukrainian Catholics have burned mountains of corpses and shed rivers of blood. To this day they continue to suffer appalling persecution for their loyalty to their Catholic Faith and to the Holy See. Yet nobody, alas, will defend them. The Soviet regime has suppressed all our dioceses and proscribed our Catholic Faith. To celebrate our Liturgy and to administer the sacraments we are forced into hiding in the Catacombs. Hundreds of thousands of the faithful, hundreds of priests and all the bishops have been thrown into prison or deported to the Arctic Circle. Yet after all that, and for purely diplomatic purposes, the Catholics of the Ukraine, martyrs, and confessors though they be, have been abandoned as embarrassing evidence of an ancient injustice."

To keep in touch with those still continuing the struggle behind the Iron Curtain, Archbishop Slipyi, as soon as possible after his arrival in the West, instigated inquiries into the feasibility of a Samyvdav, a Ukrainian word meaning an unofficial, uncensored literature circulating clandestinely, on the lines of the Lithuanian Samizdat,² which had occasionally come into his hands in the gulags. This typewritten Ukrainian bulletin now finds its way by clandestine routes into the West. It tells of the profound religious life of an underground Church seething with activity; of clergy frequently betrayed and arrested, then shot or deported; of bishops secretly ordaining priests and consecrating other bishops. Some of them have been able to come over to the Free World—and have then returned. (At present there are three bishops and around three hundred priests in the enemy's territory. There are priests celebrating Mass deep in forests, and taking advantage of market days to administer the sacraments to the faithful. There are seminaries like those at Ternopyl and Kolomya. Discovered and dispersed, they are re-established in new cellars and different forest huts. There are mysterious convents, such as the one discovered by the police at Lviv in 1974, and other religious communities whose members work in factories or at communal labour or on the railways. There are catechism classes where the children play at 'outlaws' in the woods, and then, at the sound of a whistle, gather for their lessons in a pre-arranged thicket. It has been claimed that some KGB members were committing suicide through drunkenness (statement by Gorbachev, September, 1985). In reality many have been driven out of their minds by their constantly fruitless attempts to lay hands on the elusive "secret priests". The same thing happened in France in 1793 during the attempt to exterminate the Catholics of the Vendée region and their flourishing underground Church.

The Disputed Millennium

For all this multi-faceted and highly successful activity, Cardinal Slipyi had his sights set further ahead yet. In A.D. 988, missionaries from Constantinople had brought Christianity to Prince Vladimir of Kiev, and the Metropolitan was determined upon a solemn celebration of the thousandth anniversary of this supremely important event, culminating in a great Ukrainian Catholic pilgrimage to the Holy Land. As early as 1978 he had alerted all Ukrainian communities to begin making the most thorough preparations possible for the commemorative celebrations. Pope John Paul II added the prestige of his support in a highly important letter to the Cardinal dated March 19th, 1979. Here are the most significant passages:

"You have reminded us that the first millennium since the introduction of Christianity to Rusland³ is drawing to a close... He invites us to look back on the living faith of the past thousand years, which is also mercy and in which His justice is demonstrated to the full.

...The Christianity embraced by the royal family of Kiev later spread north and east... The Church in East and West was united. The fact that it belonged to two different cultures was a source of richness... Then came the separation, but the Church in the Ukraine made a number of efforts to recover the lost unity... Finally, at the Council of Florence, (1439), Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev became the ardent champion of the union between the Eastern and Western Churches... (on account of which) he had to suffer much from Moscow. Having been imprisoned, he escaped and came to Rome, where he led the cause of unity.

This unity was achieved by your Church in 1596 at Brest-Litovsk. You retain the distinctive features of your rites and ecclesial traditions, the Church-Slavonic language, Russian liturgical chant and all the practices of piety which are so closely bound up with the history of your people... (In your history) the mark of the Cross of Christ is clearly visible, the Cross that so many of you have borne on your own shoulders. You, venerable brother, have had your share in carrying that Cross, as have so many of your fellow-bishops who, through all the sufferings and outrages which they have undergone for Christ have remained faithful to their last breath. The same must be said of numerous priests and religious, both men and women, and faithful laity of your Church... The Apostolic See has taught and reiterated that every believer is entitled to profess his faith and to share in the life of the ecclesial community to which he or she belongs, and that every country is bound to recognise the right to life and action of the Church to which its inhabitants adhere."

We have quoted this official letter from the pope to Metropolitan Slipyi at some length to establish that John Paul II has spoken very clearly and without ambiguity on the religious genocide being practised against the Ukrainians, and on the Siberian gulags. The letter was enthusiastically received by the Ukrainian community, and was disseminated all over the world. The Samivdav got copies into the U.S.S.R., and they multiplied as if by magic. The communist authorities must have been infuriated, but they put on a very good show of indifference. The Russian Orthodox Church, however, (their servile mouthpiece) was also motivated by its particular hatred of Ukrainian Catholics and gave the game away. On September 4th, 1979, Metropolitan Juvenal of Krutitsy wrote a no-holds-barred protest to Rome: "...Theologians and the episcopate both consider it necessary to issue a public criticism of this letter... It affirms that reunion (with Rome) remains an important means of re-establishing the unity of the Churches; it claims that the Union of Brest (1596) retains its ecclesial and religious force and continues to be of exceptional importance to the Apostolic See... I should very much appreciate a speedy reply."

The tone of this demand is reminiscent of a sergeant-major addressing an enlisted man on fatigues. The pope entrusted the composition of a reply to Cardinal Willebrands, head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity. His letter is very long, somewhat congested and discreetly conciliatory. Nevertheless, the essential is there: "For Ukrainian Catholics, whether in their own country or elsewhere, the Union of Brest has always been of particular significance. Despite the political vicissitudes and pressures of several centuries, these Catholics still feel bound to the See of Rome by a communion which they desire to express in their ecclesiastical structures. The pope has expressed the ecclesial and permanent value which the Union still has for these Catholics, who find in their Church the fruitful expression of their religious life, and he encourages them to remain true to this spiritual patrimony."

Notes

1. The Vatican delegate did not see fit to mention Ukrainian Catholics by name; Cardinal Casaroli's "Ostpolitik" would not admit of his deputy's showing the implacable tyrants of Moscow in a bad light.

2. The Lithuanian Samizdat, started in 1950, is expanding rapidly, and regularly reaches the West via secret channels. It has produced its heroes and martyrs, such as the famous Nicole Sadunaite, who survived six years in the gulags and is carrying on the struggle.

3. The Ukrainians call their country and all the land to the north "Rusland", implying that Kiev is the true capital. Moscow they consider an upstart and of no interest to them. From "Rus", of course, derives the form "Russia".