God and Government

By Walter Kish

Over the past few months in Ukraine, there has been much discussion over President Yushchenko’s overt efforts to encourage the reunification of the major Ukrainian Christian faiths.  As many of you know, there are no less than three Orthodox churches (Moscow Patriarchate, Kyiv Patriarchate and Autocephalous), as well as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church that predominates in Western Ukraine.  The history of how things got this way is a tangled web of politics, conquest, empire building and controversy that stretches back a thousand years, and despite the President’s best efforts, it is not likely that religious harmony and unity is on the immediate horizon.

To understand the dynamics of the current religious environment in Ukraine, it is necessary to delve a little bit into its history, and that started essentially a thousand years ago when the then ruler of the Kyivan-Rus Principality, Volodymyr the Great, mandated that the Byzantine Christian Church become the official state religion.  Volodymyr realized that to hold together the many fractious tribal components of his princedom, he needed a common unifying force, and in religion he found an effective solution.  A common faith would help overcome petty tribal rivalries, ethnic mistrust, vast geographies, local warlords and other divisive factors, and help legitimize and maintain his centralized rule.  Although Christianity had  a presence in Kyivan-Rus prior to Volodymyr, it was only subsequent to 988 A.D. when it became the official state sanctioned religion that it became widespread and firmly established.

One should note that at that time, Christianity was still essentially united with the seat of power residing in Constantinople.  It was not until the Great Schism in 1054 that the church split into its Roman Catholic wing centred in Rome and the Orthodox Church centred in Constantinople.  The Ukrainian church of the time stayed on the Orthodox side of the great religious divide.

The next major development came in the late Sixteenth Century in Western Ukraine which had become part of an expanding Polish Kingdom.  The Poles were strongly Roman Catholic and bent on converting their eastern brethren.  In the face of significant resistance, a compromise solution was engineered and in 1596 part of the Ukrainian Church was absorbed into a newly created Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which although subservient to Rome, was able to maintain a distinctly Byzantine character and a certain measure of autonomy. Over the next several centuries, it became the dominant church in Western and parts of Central Ukraine.

In the meantime, Central and Eastern Ukraine came increasingly under the control of their northern Russian neighbours and this extended beyond just the political sphere into the religious as well.  In 1686, using a strategy combining strong-arm tactics as well as outright bribery, the Russians engineered for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which until then had been under the control of the Patriarch of Kyiv, to become subservient to the Patriarch of Moscow.  For the Russian rulers of the time, religion was just another tool to be used to achieve their expansionist imperialist aims.  As Russian control of Ukraine expanded westward, they forcibly liquidated the Greek Catholic churches in their territories, so that by the time the Twentieth Century came around, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church became confined to Halychyna, the part of Western Ukraine then under the Austrian Empire.

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the early 1920s, a significant number of the existing Ukrainian Orthodox churches split off from the Russian Orthodox Church to form the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC).  This Church as well as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church were allowed to exist for a while under Communist rule, however as Stalinism became more entrenched in the 1930s, both were suppressed with most of the clergy winding up executed or in prison.  When the Communists realized that eliminating religion entirely was not realistic, they subverted the Russian Orthodox Church and, like during Tsarist times, it became more a tool of the government than a spiritual religious institution. 

When Ukraine became independent once more in 1991, Filaret, one of the key leaders and a Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate, sought to legally create an autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church once again, but when he met with fierce resistance from the Russian religious establishment, he engineered a unilateral split and created a new entity which came to be called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate.  To complicate matters further, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church rejuvenated themselves so that currently there are three separate Orthodox churches as well as a Greek Catholic one in Ukraine fighting for the hearts and souls of the Ukrainian faithful.

Needless to say, all the wrangling and religious controversy has less to do with faith, and more to do with politics and egos.  One would think that God in all His Wisdom would care little about semantics, organizational structures and political agendas.  His primary concern obviously has more to do with the state of our souls, rather than the artificial organizational, political and organization structures we construct to bring some semblance of order to our daily lives.

Be that as it may, as human beings we need social and philosophical frameworks within which to live our lives, and for over a millennium the Church has played an indispensible part in creating and maintaining a “Ukrainian” ethos and culture.  In accepting that there is such a thing as a “Ukrainian” soul, then it behooves us to strive towards the ideal of having one Ukrainian Church that, like it did for Volodymyr the Great, would provide the basis for building and maintaining a strong and united Ukraine.