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.

The Glory of Ukraine

 

The Glory of Ukraine: Sacred Images from the 11th to the 19th Centuries (Bethesda, MD: Foundation for International Arts & Education, 2010), viii+176pp.

           

This book, brought together by various persons and institutions, including especially the Kyiv Pechersk National Historical and Cultural Preserve and the Lviv National Museum Named for Andrei Sheptytsky, was published in conjunction with an iconographic exhibition in the United States under the same name. I saw this exhibition, and bought the book, in Manhattan at the Museum of Biblical Art in late July 2010, almost nine years to the day I was in the Kyivan Caves Monastery itself. The exhibition is also touring Washington, DC and then Omaha, Nebraska. 

This book reproduces in handsome full-page color plates the many icons and other religious works of art now on display outside Ukraine for the first time. I remember standing in the Sheptytsky Museum in Lviv in 2001 amazed at the metropolitan’s prescience in preserving so many precious artefacts that he knew would one day again be of interest to religious believers, art historians, and other scholars worldwide. This exhibit and book are proving him right nearly seven decades after his death.

In addition to icons, both the exhibition and this book feature several gospel books on display, numerous hand and pectoral crosses and encolpia, liturgical items (veils, a diskos and asterisk, tabernacle, chalices), and a few vestments, including a striking green highback phelon with silver thread from the eighteenth century. Religious art dominates both the exhibition and the plates in this book, though only part of it is, strictly speaking, iconographic in nature. Much more common, in fact, are eighteenth-century three-dimensional Baroque paintings, including several of the charming if odd “Christ the Vigilant Eye” type.

Ecumenism Binds Everybody

Certain Eastern Christians, upon hearing the word "ecumenism" and its cognates, fall into fits of apoplexy and begin, tiresomely, to fulminate about ecumenism as "the pan-heresy." Fr. John Jillions, an OCA priest at the Sheptytsky Institute in Ottawa, showed me a copy this past summer of a rather droll little "icon" in support of this view. It comes replete with Luther, the pope, and others apparently assailing HMS Orthodoxy and trying to sink or at least run her aground:

Others, while not paranoid about ecumenism as some destructive, demonic force, are nonetheless uninterested in supporting the move towards Christian unity. Neither position, of course, is even remotely theologically defensible. One may not agree with certain methods of ecumenism in every instance, but one cannot, precisely as an o/Orthodox Christian, disagree with the goal of unity and the dominical imperative (cf. John 17) that the Church be one. Unity is not optional. Remaining content in our divisions is sin.

Steven Harmon has written a very short little book that is very useful in trying to overcome the apathy today about ecumenism while also allaying the sometimes understandable anxieties of Christians who imagine that ecumenism means selling out to some kind of lowest-common-denominator version of the faith:

 Ecumenism Means You, Too (Cascade Books, 2010), 120pp.

A Baptist theologian teaching in the School of Divinity at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, Harmon, who keeps a very interesting blog here, offers us two very useful things in this book. First is his opening call for all Christians to understand that ecumenism, properly understood, does not (pace our Eastern polemicists) entail any doctrinal diminution or dogmatic compromises. Only unity founded on the truth, to which we all come and unreservedly consent, can be accepted. So the idea of ecumenism as selling out to Luther, or being dominated by the pope, or taking on false doctrines so that the ship of Orthodoxy sinks, is just great silliness. No Orthodox hierarch today that I know of is willing to compromise on fundamental dogmatic matters in order to achieve unity. That is why the process is so painstaking and time-consuming.

The second important reminder of this text comes in the sub-title: "Ordinary Christians and the Quest for Christian Unity." Every Christian needs to be involved in the search for unity. If unity is to happen between Catholics and Orthodox, we have an enormous amount of work to do at the grassroots. Theological dialogue and agreements between bishops are necessary but not sufficient. Part of the reason Ferrara-Florence failed is precisely because the hierarchs did not carry the people with them. I fear we have insufficiently mastered that lesson of failure and its cause. Twenty years ago I began working in the World Council of Churches, and traveled all over the world, only to return home every time and realize that nobody had the faintest clue that the WCC even existed, let alone any interest in what it might be trying to do. Ecumenism thus remains too top-down, too "elitist," and this must change. As Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of blessed memory used to say: the Lord will give us unity when all of His people rise up in prayer demanding it. If Harmon's book helps us to do that, then glory to God.