Are There more Catholic than Orthodox?

Question: Are there more Catholic than Orthodox churches as well as people,or are they just more high profile ?

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There are more Ukrainian Catholics and Catholic churches than Orthodox in Eastern Canada. This is owed primarily to the post-World War II Ukrainian immigration from western Ukraine.

Your interesting point regarding perception of their greater numbers etc. has to do with the fact that the "Third Wave" Ukrainian immigration was not only nationalistic, but also, by and large, the educated, urban middle class. They quickly took over the existing Ukrainian Canadian institutions, radio stations, newspapers and the like, injecting new life into them with their aggressive political perspectives.

Ukrainian nationalism as we have come to know it was largely a western Ukrainian phenomenon. This is not to say that it was a Ukrainian Catholic phenomenon as well. Let's remember that the first units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were from Orthodox Volyn.

Ukrainian Catholic nationalists also tended to see their relationship with Rome primarily in political, not religious, terms. The Pope and the Vatican were, to them, vehicles through which the struggle for a free Ukraine could be mediated to the West. It was believed that if no one stood up for an oppressed Ukraine in the West, Rome would. The political issues surrounding the development of a Ukrainian Catholic Patriarchate, strongly supported by the nationalists, were of the same perspective.

Even to be a Ukrainian Catholic in Galicia was to be truly "Ukrainian" insofar as what was Orthodox was seen to be purely Russian. Of course, this did not extend to the movement begun in 1921 by Metropolitan Basil Lypkivsky.

In addition, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, highly suspicious of the Russian Orthodox Church, made a number of attempts to further Latinize the Ukrainian Catholic Church. At the outbreak of the First World War, Vienna ordered the Ukrainian Catholic Metropolia to remove from the Church's calendar a number of saints it considered "too Orthodox," including a number of Miraculous Icons belonging in the same category, like that of Kazan, Pochayiv etc.

The strong national leadership of Ukrainian Catholic churchmen like Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky and Josef Cardinal Slypyj, hailed as the Ukrainian Catholic Patriarch by those who were of either a nationalistic or strong Eastern Rite orientation, also consolidated the Ukrainian Catholic identity.

However, as everyone knows, Rome's overtures to the Russian Patriarchate really lays waste to any hopes that Ukrainian Catholic nationalists and champions of the Byzantine Rite ever had for a recognition of their Church's patriarchal or even particular status. 

As a result, we have been hearing less of the Eastern Catholic triumphalism than previously. Arguments in favour of the Union of Brest-Litovsk are now based largely on religious than political or other perspectives. But from the religious or theological point of view, Rome has conceded that the Union of 1596 was a mistake. All this has left Ukrainian Catholics in a sort of ecclesial "limbo." Add to this the treatment at the hands of "Rome's men" in the person of newly appointed Ukrainian Catholic bishops . . .

In terms of impact, what I see happening in Eastern Canada is the presentation of Ukrainian spiritual identity from the point of view of Byzantine Rite and Orthodox perspectives, leaving out the whole issue of Rome and the Union. It has become almost "politically incorrect" in the Ukrainian community today to emphasize a religious fact (namely the Union) that has been largely transformed into an embarassment from the spiritual as well as the national-culture points of view.

Dr. Alexander Roman  alex@unicorne.org