RUSSIAN WORLD Ukraine, the Church and the people

On the occasion of Holy Christmas, which since last year has been a national holiday in Ukraine and celebrated together by Catholics and Orthodox, except for those who remain united to Moscow and the traditions of the old calendar, it has been published in Rbk-Ukraina an extensive interview with the Major Archbishop of the Greek Catholics, His Beatitude Svjatoslav Shevchuk. His faithful remember him in the liturgies as “our patriarch”, a title that has never been officially recognized by the Holy See to avoid further confusion, but which is very clear to the heirs of the Union of Brest at the end of the 16th century. Beyond predictions about the future of the war with Russia, a common topic on all international websites, the main authority of Catholics “of the Orthodox tradition” focuses on the topic that really interests him: not the relationship with the Russians , but with his own people, and the future of the Ukrainian land.

Ukraine is the Rus'(ia) that refuses to be part of the “Russian world”, that seeks its own identity and feels part of Europe and the universal brotherhood of Christians and all men of good will, those who They do not try to impose themselves on others to assert themselves, as the Moscow Russians have always tried to do. According to sociological studies, the number of Orthodox faithful linked to Moscow has drastically reduced in the three years following the invasion of the country, while the number of Greek Catholics has increased significantly, approaching the autocephalous Orthodox Church (PZU) and becoming the second religious community in Ukraine. However, Shevchuk does not claim primacy or proselytizing successes but, on the contrary, expresses his solidarity with those who have felt “betrayed by their own Mother, holy Russia.” If anything, it vindicates the role of active protagonists that Greek Catholics try to play in a constructive dialogue with the autocephalians, whose leader, the Metropolitan of kyiv Epifanyj (Dumenko), was recently received in the Vatican by Pope Francis, to join to the reconstruction of a country destroyed, humiliated and emptied by the attacks of the Moscow “older brothers.”

According to the archbishop, “the trauma of feeling betrayed by one’s own Church is a particularly dramatic phenomenon, which is unfolding before everyone’s eyes, and sociology is not enough to explain what is happening in the souls of our Ukrainian sisters and brothers. “. What interests the supreme pastor of Greek Catholics is not so much how to stop the war, a task that falls to state and military authorities, but “how the war has affected our society and our people, and the new challenges to which the Church is called to respond, ours together with the other Orthodox Churches of our country”. It is the third Christmas and New Year of war, and the conflict has disrupted all human relationships, which will not be easy to rebuild, even more so than the devastated buildings and cities. “First of all, the relationship with oneself, with what each of us must do today, what are the priorities and relationships with our own loved ones and our own neighbors, those for whom we assume responsibilities and duties,” affirms the patriarch of the Greek Catholics.

Regarding the topic of relationships that need to be rebuilt, Shevchuk makes a truly profound observation, noting that “the relationships with God, the rules and habits of our spiritual and religious life have also radically changed; we ourselves have changed.” To all those who look at Ukraine from the outside, thinking that they know the people who live there, “we must tell them that the Ukraine that they thought they knew no longer exists… We are different, and we want to be better.” After living such a tragic experience, “we are living the moment of a new birth, better yet, of a re-birth”, in which there are heroes who defend the country not only on the battlefields, but also “giants of the spirit that return us to the deepest foundations of the existence of our people, to the matrix of our national and spiritual life.

The war has also been the cause of a crisis of faith, which seeks protection from the enemy, which invokes divine help that does not seem to arrive, but “that is not how the relationship with God works,” explains the archbishop, “the true living God “It is a person, it is Someone, not just something, and we must know how to recognize it in our personal relationship with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in the context of our own capacity for relationship.” The representation of God as the “Great Protector” who guarantees our well-being is a “stereotype that has been destroyed, so we must learn again to ask ourselves: God, where are you? Where can we find you in times of war? How should I communicate with you today? Should we rediscover the authentic presence of God among us,” exhorts Shevchuk. For many people, God has disappeared from the spiritual horizon, and then he has manifested himself again, and “in these three years we have lived many moments of this type, moments of terror and helplessness, and after regeneration of our forces, of joint defense of our lives and our land, and then again of fatigue and depression, always looking for the source that can give us back our energy and love for life.

Wounds heal and spirits revive, this is the only secret of the extraordinary resilience of the Ukrainian people. The experience of war helps believers to rediscover in a new way the image of the life-giving God, not only to defend themselves from evil, but to rebuild themselves, society and the life of the people. The interview recalls the meeting of the Synod of Greek-Catholic bishops with the civil authorities, in the context of the “Ukrainian resistance plan”, and the archbishop underlines the importance of the “increasingly significant appreciation of the role and place that the Church occupies in these difficult times”. Men in power often cultivate the illusion that they can do everything themselves, while it is now more evident that “the religious life of the people and the support of the Church are the secret of the authentic victory we want to achieve.” It is clear that it is not only about the social assistance service of the Church, or the defense of Ukrainian national interests at the international level, but “the function of accompanying our people, subjected to the madness of war.”

People need not to feel alone and abandoned, and the presence of priests reminds them that there is always someone who takes care of those who suffer, those who need advice, rediscovering the pastoral nature of the Church, before the charitable and social. “We are a Church founded on roots dating back to early Christianity in kyiv,” recalls Shevchuk, “with fraternal ties with the Orthodox, and in union with the entire universal Catholic Church, half of our structures are located outside the borders of Ukraine”. That is why “the Russian aggressor hates us so much, and has always tried to destroy the Greek Catholic Church, both in the times of the tsars and the Soviets, and especially today, when the lord of the Kremlin tries to rebuild the empire” . Returning to a term often used by the Moscow Patriarchate, the archbishop explains that the Greek Catholic Church is also “builder of the State,” gosudarstvo-ustanavitelnajafor its contribution to history and the current renaissance, but it has never been nor does it want to be a “State Church”, gosudarstvennaya Tserkov.

To questions about the role of the Holy See in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which has often aroused perplexity among Ukrainians and Greek Catholics themselves, Shevchuk explains that “the war can be looked at from the point of view of the victims, or from that of those who seek to be an arbitrator at the international level, to serve all suffering peoples and fulfill a mission of universal peacemaker. When Pope Francis speaks of “two brother peoples” he does not understand it in the same way as the Russians, as a justification for an invasion and a genocide, and, in any case, “he recently said that we are cousins, not exactly brothers, although It is enough for us to say that we are neighbors, without specifying the degree of relationship.” Shevchuk remembers the years of his ministry in Argentina, when Bergoglio was his superior as metropolitan archbishop of Buenos Aires. “I communicate with him often, and we speak in Spanish between us,” exchanging points of view even when they don’t entirely coincide.

The Vatican does not have an active role as a political mediator in the possible peace negotiations, assures the head of the Greek Catholics, among other things because “no one has asked it to”, but for ten years it has been engaged in a humanitarian dialogue, as well as religious, when the annexation of Crimea took place and the conflict in the Donbass began. He observes that “mediators of all kinds have been proposed and assigned to us, but so far no negotiations have begun; we will see what happens this year.” Greek Catholics, for their part, are already working for the rebirth of Ukraine.

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