Papal Visit to Ukraine Revisited: The Real Agenda

Vatican officials have now let it be known that the ultimate goal of the pope's visit to Ukraine in June 2001 is to use it to pave the way for a desired papal tour of Moscow.

The Moscow Patriarchate has been rather firm in the recent past about the impossibility of Pope John Paul II coming to Russia unless certain "demands" by the Russian Orthodox Church are met in advance.

High on that list is, of course, the issue of the Greek Catholics in western Ukraine and their taking back those churches the Russians originally confiscated from them in 1946 together with charges of aggression against Russian clergy etc.

A Vatican "specialist" on East European affairs, an experienced diplomat in his own right, has publicly denied the Russian charges.  He was in Ukraine, he said, and saw for himself that they weren't true.

Despite this rhetoric, and despite anything the pope himself will say while in L'viv in June of next year, it is clear that the Vatican's latent objective is to appease the Russians while appearing to praise the Ukrainian Catholics for their loyalty and commitment to Rome.

This would not be the first time in history when the policy of appeasement to obtain greater ecclesiastical-political goals was put into practice.

The Union of Brest-Litovsk in 1596 was itself, Catholic analysts themselves now say, a "trial run" among the Ukrainians and Belorussians to see if the "bigger fish," namely, Moscow would "bite" on the hook of the Latin ecclesiastical agenda of reunification under the papal tiara.

Moscow didn't bite, however.  What the Union left in its wake, to quote directly from the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, was a divided nation (would someone please say, "Ukraine") and spiritual enmity among the churches that lasts to this day.

Whatever superlatives some might use in describing the Union, the fact remains, by the admission of Catholic historians and ecumenicists, that it was primarily a ploy that looked beyond Ukraine to the Great Russian expanse.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church suffered something similar itself.  During the seventeenth century, Eastern Patriarchs under the Muslim Yoke were obliged to travel to Russia to ask for funding support.

Fresh from what was obviously a successful visit at Moscow, Patriarch Theophane of Jerusalem dropped in to see what was going on in Ukraine. 

He found the Orthodox Church there without a hierarchy and divided in the aftermath of the Union of Brest-Litovsk.

He then consecrated a new hierarchy for the Ukrainian and Belorussian Orthodox Churches.

But before the Patriarch left for home, he warned the Kozak Host, those intrepid defenders of Orthodoxy and saviours of so many individual Orthodox Christians from the slavery of the Turks and Tatars, that they were to never again consider the Russians their enemies.

There really is no free lunch . . . 

An argument is sometimes made that the Kozaks formed a unique Orthodox entity in and of themselves.  Their traditions were different from those of the rest of mainstream Orthodoxy.  Certainly they raised patriarchal eyebrows on more than one occasion.  

Happily, though, the Kozaks were their own men.  They were fighting the greatest super-powers of their day such as Turkey, Poland and Russia.  They did so with a carefree smile.  They were certainly not about to listen to the grumblings of a Patriarch whose knees were worn from asking others for needed money.

While all the parties involved with the upcoming papal visit to Ukraine may believe it will help them achieve their own particular goals and objectives, history does and will in this case repeat itself.

The Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches, as usual, may expect nothing from any quarter other than their own to help them resolve their current challenges and difficulties. 

As the famous song prophetically goes, "V Yednosti Sila" or "In unity is there strength!"

Dr. Alexander Roman  alex@unicorne.org