Saints Preserve Us:
The Vatican Gives Haloes to Ukrainians

As the papal visit to Ukraine draws nearer, the Vatican has been engaged in what some say is a flurry of activity designed to promote good will and, in some cases, mend some bridges.  The Pope himself yesterday received in audience people who had taken into their homes the child-victims of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster to thank them and to let everyone know he is eager to "kiss the Ukrainian soil" in June.  But the latest act of the Vatican with respect to the Ukrainian Catholic Church is certainly noteworthy.

The Vatican announced that the Pope will beatify no less than thirty Ukrainian Catholic martyrs during his visit.

"Beatification" is the Roman Catholic canonization of a saint whose cult is designated for a locality, in this case, Ukraine and the Ukrainian Catholic Church there and in the Diaspora, as well as any other Church that wishes to practice their cult.

In the case of Martyrs, Roman Catholic canon law simply requires the formal acknowledgement of true martyrdom (i.e. death for religious faith) as the only condition for beatification.

Included in this group is Bishop Mykola Charnetsky, and 25 others.

Rome moved to placate the feelings of the Ruthenians of Mukachevo who insist they are not Ukrainian and don't belong to the Ukrainian Church by declaring Bishop Theodore Romzha of Mukachiv, martyred by the Bolsheviks, a "Ruthenian" Martyr.  This won't, however, prevent Ukrainians from celebrating him among their choir of new martyrs.

Fr. Emilian Kovc, a priest from Stanislaviv, has also been declared a Martyr.  He died in the Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek in 1944.

The formal recognition of miracles attributed to the intercession of holy people was made in two further Ukrainian cases.  The famous Ukrainian Catholic nun, Sister Josaphata Hordashevska and the Ukrainian priest, Zigmund Gorazdowski who could both, as a result, be beatified at some future date as well.

Before a canonization process may proceed, the Roman Catholic Church insists on a process that formally establishes the "heroic virtues" of a candidate.  This was done in the case of the Ukrainian-born (Volyn), Polish Catholic Archbishop Sigismund Felinski. 

The Vatican listed Felinski among the Ukrainian choir because of his birth on Ukrainian soil.

The Vatican is at least being consistent.  Thirteen Ukrainian Catholic martyrs, shot by Russian Tsarist troops as they tried to defend their Church in Pidlasia, who were beatified by the Pope not too long ago, are considered saints of Poland because their area was under Polish administrative control.  This is why their relics are preserved in a Polish Catholic Church in Warsaw.

However, this reminds one of the story of the mare who was about to give birth to a colt.  But as the clouds began to darken and it started to rain, the mare ran into the barn.  

Now, the story goes, what will be born, a horse or a cow?

The Martyrs of Pratulyn belong to the Ukrainian Catholic Church, irrespective of who controlled the land on which stood their Ukrainian Church before which they were gunned down. 

And Archbishop Felinski belongs in the Polish Catholic Choir of saints which is already quite large, thanks to their Pope Jan Pavel Drugi!

Notable by his absence from the list is Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky.  Sources have said that the Polish episcopate has convinced the Pope not to beatify him at present.

This is perhaps why Rome has stated unequivocally that the Pope will only beatify martyrs in Ukraine and not any other category of saint. And, of course, Metropolitan Andrew was not a martyr. 

That is certainly one clever way for the Vatican to cover its backside!  And it is always "nice" to hear about bishops uniting together behind a cause, even it is to undo a cause (for sainthood) . . .

Apart from these ongoing concerns, it is interesting that the Vatican would come up with such a hefty list of new Ukrainian Catholic saints when Ukraine has not formerly been known to be high on the list of Roman Catholic priorities in that department.

Clearly, Rome wants to make as good an impression with the Ukrainian Catholic Church and people as possible just before the Pope's visit.

The good will Rome hopes to engender with all these new Ukrainian saints just might be needed, as some say, to off-set any nastiness that the Pope might experience from other quarters in Ukraine, especially with those loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate.

The papal visit, like a visit from Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, is not good news for Moscow.

Moscow has always considered all of Ukraine to be its ecclesiastical, if not now imperial, backyard, part and parcel of its hegemony.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarch, His Holiness Filaret, and his movement just won't go away as Moscow had hoped.  

The new Ukrainian Catholic Cardinal and Patriarch Lubomyr Huzar has also been the subject of attacks by Moscow.

Ukrainian Catholic Church leaders dedicated to the purity of their Ukrainian and Byzantine traditions, like Huzar, are definitely not on the Moscow Patriarch's Christmas gift list!

Add to this Huzar's tendency to be unabashedly controversial while standing up to Rome for his Church's Particular Rights and being friends with the Ukrainian Orthodox, and you have someone who simply isn't "flavour of the month" at St Daniel's Monastery!

One Russian Orthodox Patriarchal representative actually used what was generally thought to have been a forgotten tactic, that of lumping Ukrainian Catholics and Orthodox together as people of a common "Uniate mentality" because both Churches are welcoming the Pope to Ukraine!

Russians considered the Greeks to have fallen prey to this after the Council of Florence and this led to the development of the fiction of Moscow as the "Third Rome," a fiction which the Pope himself has appeared to have subscribed to . . .

Certainly, the Poles have historically called all Ukrainians, Catholic or Orthodox, "schismatics." 

This came out in a discussion between a Ukrainian Catholic bishop and the Ukrainian Orthodox Saint Yuri Konissky, Archbishop of Mohyliv (glorified by the Belarussian Orthodox Church).

The Catholic bishop told his counterpart that, in the heat of argument, "Poles call us Uniates "schismatics" as well!"

Taras Shevchenko alluded to this numerous times in his historical poems i.e. in his poem about the "Opryshky" Gonta and Zalizniak and how the Poles sat down to think up a scheme with which to destroy the "schismatics" where this term means "Ukrainians."

Vatican and other western media reports don't really help the situation because of their focus on the strictly religious and church side of the question.

Thus, the constant allusions to the "many" Churches in Ukraine.

In fact, the Kyivan Patriarchate and the Autocephalous Ukrainian Church are working to harmonize and unify their structures.  The Ukrainian Catholic Church is also working to be cooperative and ecumenical here as well.

The division of Churches in Ukraine is really along the lines of "Ukrainian" and "Russian."

Let us hope that the Pope remembers when he meets up with anti-papal demonstrators in Ukraine.

He should listen to the language these will use to cry out against him.

If the Pope's Ukrainian is better than his Russian, he shouldn't be too upset by the cat-calls!

Dr. Alexander Roman  alex@unicorne.org