Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and the Nazis

It has been said for years that one of the factors holding up the canonization of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky is some concern around what he may have said with regard to the German invaders of 1941. This new study, by a young historian Andriy Mykhaleyko, is therefore going to be invaluable in airing and analyzing these claims once and for all: Metropolit Andrey Graf Sheptytskyj und das NS-Regime: Zwischen christlichem Ideal und politischer Realität (Brill, 2020).

Mykhaleyko's book is published by Brill as the first volume in their new series, Eastern Church Identities. About that series Brill tells us this:

This new series focuses on the interplay between theological thinking and cultural self-understanding of the Oriental-Orthodox, the Byzantine and the Uniate branches of the Eastern Churches worldwide. The series studies the Eastern Churches' various roles within their mainfold contexts, i.e. either as actors within the transformation-processes in Eastern Europe or as minorities both in the Middle East and in the north American diaspora. By fully acknowledging the role of ritual and hagiography for the ecclesial community-building and the theology of the Eastern Churches the series opens up new approaches to an often-neglected dimension of global Christianity. The series accepts contributions in English, German and French. Each incoming manuscript is evaluated in a peer-reviewing-process conducted by renowned specialists from the editorial and the advisory boards.

And about the book itself the publisher tells us this:

Metropolit Andrey Sheptytskyj war der einflussreichste Repräsentant der Ukrainischen Griechisch-Katholischen Kirche im 20. Jahrhundert. Sein letzter Lebensabschnitt unter dem NS-Regime wird bis heute sehr gegensätzlich bewertet und kontrovers diskutiert.

Während die sowjetische Geschichtsschreibung Sheptytskyj als Kollaborateur des NS-Regimes, Feind des Kommunismus und Agenten des Vatikans verurteilte, verehrt die griechisch-katholische Kirche ihn als nationale Symbolfigur, als »neuen Moses«, dessen Heiligsprechung sie betreibt. Mykhaleyko legt einen Beitrag zur Neubewertung Sheptytskyjs vor: Durch die Kontextualisierung seiner Biographie im Zeitalter der Totalitarismen während der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts korrigiert die Studie die historischen Narrative, dekonstruiert die ideologischen Porträts Sheptytskyjs und entmythologisiert das ambivalente Verhältnis Sheptytskyjs zum NS-Regime.

Uniates in a Partitioned Poland

If this new book by Larry Wolff is half as fascinating as his The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture, it will be very good indeed. Just out last month is Larry Wolff, Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland (Harvard University Press, 2020), 156pp.

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria concluded agreements to annexand finally eradicate the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. As a result of the partitions of Poland, the members of the Uniate Church (later known as the Greek Catholic Church) found their dioceses fractured by the borders of three regional hegemons.

Larry Wolff’s deeply engaging study of these events delves into the politics of the episcopal elite, the Vatican, and the three rulers behind the partitions: Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria (with their successors). Wolff uses correspondence with bishops in the Uniate Church and ministerial communiques to reveal the nature of state policy as it unfolded.

This detailed study of the responses of common Uniate parishioners, as well as of their bishops and hierarchs, to the pressure of the partitions paints a vivid portrait of conflict, accommodation, and survival in a Church subject to the grand designs of the late eighteenth century’s premier absolutist powers.

Additionally, Wolff adopts methodologies from the history of popular culture pioneered by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre) and Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms) to explore religious experience on a popular level, especially questions of confessional identity and practices of piety.

“Ukraine has been blessed and damned as a land between the East and the West, as has been the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church, an institution poised between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West. Larry Wolff provides an erudite and fascinating insight into the late eighteenth century, when the Uniates, facing attempts by imperial Russia to destroy them, were able to survive thanks to the enlightened if self-serving policies of Austria’s Habsburg monarchs” (Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto).

Ukrainian-American Bishop Constantine Bohachevsky

For more than five years now, since working with a grad student who was doing field research in Sugarloaf, PA, home of the Byzantine Carmelite sisters, I have thought that Eastern Catholics are exceptionally bad at telling our own history, and such defects must be remedied wherever possible. I am therefore delighted to see this biography forthcoming in November of this year: Ukrainian Bishop, American Church: Constantine Bohachevsky and the Ukrainian Catholic Church Hardcover by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak (Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 544pp.

I greatly look forward to reading this, and I hope to be able to arrange an interview on here with the author.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Constantine Bohachevsky was not a typical bishop. On the eve of his unexpected nomination as bishop to the Ukrainian Catholics in America, in March 1924, the Vatican secretly whisked him from Warsaw to Rome to be ordained. He arrived in America that August to a bankrupt church and a hostile clergy. He stood his ground, and chose to live simple missionary life. He eschewed public pomp, as did his immigrant congregations. He regularly visited his scattered churches. He fought a bitter fight for the independence of the church from outside interference – a kind of struggle between the Church and the state, absent both. He refashioned a failing immigrant church in America into a self-sustaining institution that half a century after his death could help resurrect the underground Catholic Church in Ukraine, which became the largest Eastern Catholic church today.

This trailblazing biography, based on recently opened sources from the Vatican, Ukraine and the United States, brings the reader from the placid life of the married Catholic Ukrainian clergy in the Habsburg Empire to industrial America.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church, formalized in 1595, melds Eastern religious practices with Western hierarchic structure, thus healing the 1054 Christian divide. While there is doctrinal unity, Eastern Catholic practice differs so markedly from that of the Latin Rite that Ukrainian immigrants in the US created their own churches. The death of the first bishop in 1916 and the long hiatus in naming a replacement led to widespread unrest. Yet, under Bohachevsky's forceful leadership, within a decade, the church developed a network of parishes, schools, colleges, and eventually a seminary, cultivating its clergy and its understanding of Eastern Catholicism. In 1958, the Pope erected the Ukrainian Catholic Archbishopric of Philadelphia and appointed Bohachevsky its Metropolitan/Archbishop.

Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox Perspectives on the Ps-Sobor of 1946

Last week, Daniel Galadza (author of this book which you must read) and I finished editing a volume we hope to see in print next year: The 'Lviv Sobor' of 1946: Arriving at a Common Narrative. It is a collection of scholarly papers given at a private conference we both attended at the University of Vienna (where Daniel teaches) and hosted by the Pro Oriente Foundation of that city in June 2016. This is just a shamelessly self-promoting and very advanced notice of the book. I will post more details as they are available.

What is this book about? As we said in our prospectus:

The volume consists of papers presented at an international conference in Vienna, Austria, in 2016, organized by Pro Oriente Stiftung and the University of Vienna, dealing with the 'Lviv Sobor' of 1946, a gathering of Greek-Catholic clergy in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv organized with the help of the Soviet government, with the aim of liquidating the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Depending on whose perspective one accepts, the event is seen either as the 'reunion' of 'Uniates' to Orthodoxy or the perpetration of a violent act against human rights and freedom of conscience. Thus, one side views it as a church council, while the other sees it as a pseudo-synod.

Why look at a little-known event now more than 70 years old? The simple answer to that finds the old line very true: the past is never truly past in Eastern Europe at least, and so 1946 is a live issue in part because, in the minds of Russian Orthodox Christians at least, it is the righting of the "injustice" of the Union of Brest of 1595/96, that event which created the modern method of "uniatism" everybody (or almost everybody) has been reprobating for a quarter-century now.

1946 has not, until our book, been given a lot of attention apart from Bohdan Bociurkiw's pioneering monograph, published in 1996: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950).

For its part, though, Brest has been subject to earlier scholarly treatments. The best two books for those looking to begin to understand these events and their context would be the collection of scholarly articles edited by B. Goren et al: Four Hundred Years Union of Brest (1596-1996) A Critical Re-evaluation.

The other important work is Borys Gudziak (who was in Vienna), Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest.

For those wanting wider and longer historical contexts, then two well-known historians who were in Vienna, one of whom contributes to our volume, have authored important works: Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy.

Churches in the Ukrainian Crisis

Just released this month is a new collection from two editors who have collaborated in the past on another significant collection (noted here): Churches in the Ukrainian Crisis, edited by Andrii Krawchuk and Thomas Bremer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225pp.

The role of the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches, the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, and other religious groups in Ukraine during first the Maidan and then the Russian invasion has been extremely significant, and a sign of not just ecumenical co-operation and mutual suffering, but also a sign of hope for the development of civil society in Ukraine. Scholars have been paying increasing attention to these developments in a number of articles in various journals, and now in collection such as this.

About this collection we are told by the publisher:

This volume explores the churches of Ukraine and their involvement in the recent movement for social justice and dignity within the country. In November of 2013, citizens of Ukraine gathered on Kyiv's central square (Maidan) to protest against a government that had reneged on its promise to sign a trade agreement with Europe. The Euromaidan protest included members of various Christian churches in Ukraine, who stood together and demanded government accountability and closer ties with Europe. In response, state forces massacred over one hundred unarmed civilians. The atrocity precipitated a rapid sequence of events: the president fled the country, a provisional government was put in place, and Russia annexed Crimea and intervened militarily in eastern Ukraine. An examination of Ukrainian churches’ involvement in this protest and the fall-out that it inspired opens up other questions and discussions about the churches’ identity and role in the country’s culture and its social and political history. Volume contributors examine Ukrainian churches’ historical development and singularity; their quest for autonomy; their active involvement in identity formation; their interpretations of the war and its causes; and the paths they have charted toward peace and unity.

From 1596 to 1946 to 2016 and Back Again

At the beginning of June, I was invited to a private conference in Vienna hosted by the Pro Oriente Foundation, which has for more than a half-century been devoted to Orthodox-Catholic rapprochement. This particular conference was on the pseudo-sobor of Lviv of 1946, that bogus action by which the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church was forced "freely" to vote to "rejoin" the "mother church" of Russia, thereby leading to the official disappearance of the UGCC for nearly half a century. All this was undertaken on Stalin's orders and with the collusion and support of the Russian Church.

The hope of the conference was expressed in the title: “Arriving at a Common Narrative: The ‘Lviv Sobor’ of 1946 and Its Aftermath to the Present.” The original vision was to have Russian Orthodox scholars and official representatives there to discuss their perspective on 1946, and to enter into dialogue with UGCC scholars and hierarchs in the hopes that some common groundwork might be found leading to an eventual healing of memories of an extremely painful episode that is still cited constantly by the Russian Church even as recently as this year in the background of the Havana declaration between the pope of Rome and patriarch of Moscow.

The Russians didn't have the courage to come to Vienna, which was disappointing but entirely unsurprising. They sent a paper that said nothing but the same talking points one has heard for decades. No dialogue is possible when one party is too scared to show up; and no "common narrative" can be discovered when one side is ideologically committed to its own narrative and admits of no alternative interpretations, let alone challenging facts and evidence that put that narrative in question.

The chain of logic in that canned presentation in Vienna, and in ongoing Russian position, is this: the Union of Brest of 1596/6 was an historical injustice (committed by, inter alia, perfidious Jesuits and other proselytizing papists preying on innocent and helpless Orthodox) rectified by the Lviv "synod" of 1946, which the Russians then and since have celebrated publicly as an act of reunion. In this line of logic, 2016, the 70th anniversary of the synod was not an occasion for mourning or repentance, but of repeated, ham-fisted insistence that it was a good thing.

The fact that Brest has been subject to scholarly examination--including at earlier Pro Oriente conferences and in the two superlative books linked above--and the fact that the historical record does not bear out the usual version of helpless Orthodox being picked off by clever Catholics, does not seem to have altered Russian narratives at all. In this regard, I found the paper in Vienna a clear illustration of something Donald Spence argued, as I noted here: there is "narrative truth" and then "historical truth" and they do not always agree. It is sad that the Russians have chosen the former over the latter, and sadder still that their preference continues to cause a lot of pain to people in Ukraine.