Ukrainians know more or less the tragic history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics, who for centuries championed the right to profess their faith and, by that very act, their national identity and national choice. And although the idea to destroy this church is still a slogan on the flags of some Orthodox churches, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) is today protected by the Constitution. It conducts a normal church life, has a well-ramified network of parishes, seminaries, institutes, monasteries and convents, and enjoys the respect of all right-minded people. Today it is the second largest church in the country, and poses no threat or disaster for the believers of other denominations.
A different fate befell the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church (BGCC), which was created in 1596 at the same Brest Council that joined not only the Ukrainians but also the Belarusians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Apostolic See. Over the next two centuries most Belarusian Christians — 85 percent of the rural population — became Greek-Catholic. During this period the BGCC devised a church rite, which remained Byzantine but borrowed certain Latin features. It developed its own tradition of icon-painting art and architecture, church canticles, and sacral vestments for the clergy. The church widely uses the Belarusian language in its pastoral pursuits.
Everything radically changed after the partitions of Poland during the rule of Catherine II, when a large part of Belarusian territory was annexed by the Russian Empire: the tsarina immediately unleashed repressions and began forcibly converting the Belarusians to Orthodoxy. More than 800 parishes were abolished at this time. Catherine II’s grandson, Tsar Nicholas I, picked up where she left off. In 1839 Polatsk was the site of the so-called Uniate Church Council, where the act of “voluntary” accession of the “Uniates” to the Russian Orthodox, was drawn up by tsarist officials. (The Soviet council of 1946 abolishing the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was patterned on this “council.”) At the same time Nicholas I issued a decree about “the acceptance of all Uniates into the bosom of Orthodoxy.” The decree, affecting 2,500 priests and 1.5 million believers, sparked protests, and hundreds of recalcitrant clergymen and parishioners were imprisoned and banished to Siberia.
This situation prevailed until World War I, when Western Belarus became part of Poland and the Belarusian Uniate Church was restored. After 1939 the “Uniates” were again outlawed. NKVD and Nazi repressions in fact eliminated the BGCC, leaving not a single Greek Catholic parish on the territory of Belarus. It was Belarusian emigres in London, Paris, Louvain, and Chicago who preserved the faith, and Rome appointed Czeslaw Sypowicz as their bishop. He was the first Greek Catholic bishop appointed since Nicholas I liquidated this church. The 1980s was admittedly a period when Belarusian society, especially the intelligentsia, displayed a new interest in Eastern Catholicism. The media began discussing the plight of the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church; the Belarusian Youth Movement Group was founded, which began to revive the Uniate Church. In 1990 the first issue of the newspaper Unia came out and the first parish was founded in spite of KGB resistance.
Times were changing, however, and in 1990 a Greek Catholic liturgy was recited in Belarusian for the first time in many years in Miensk. This solemn service was conducted at a Catholic graveyard church because there was not a single Greek Catholic church left in the capital of Belarus. The same period saw the founding of several parishes in Miensk and other cities; an important innovation was that liturgies were conducted in the Belarusian language. It is significant that the revived Belarusian church first received assistance from Ukrainian Greek Catholics: the UGCC took Belarus’s first parishes and priests under its own jurisdiction. The people of independent Belarus endorsed the idea to restore the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church: according to a 1992 poll, hundreds of thousands of people, especially intellectuals, favored this plan. But everything had to be done from scratch because of the (continuing) shortage of priests, temples, and indispensable church infrastructures.
An important event in the life of the BGCC was the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Union of Brest, held in Mahilyow and attended by foreign guests, including Cardinal Silvestrini, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation of Eastern Churches, and Ivan Martyniak, UGCC Archbishop of Peremyshl. Another wonderful moment was the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ukraine in 2001, when Belarus sent one of the largest foreign delegations (200 people) to meet the pontiff. Belarusian national flags elicited surprise and support in Ukraine: from the crowds of pilgrims you could hear the chanting of Belarusian slogans, “Carry on!” and “We are with you!”
But the everyday day life of the church is still difficult and fraught with uncertainty. The government has banned the construction of churches, and services are held in scarce chapels or Roman Catholic churches; there is a shortage of priests because of the lack of a seminary, and it is forbidden to invite clergymen from abroad. The strongest opposition to the church’s revival comes from the Belarusian government, especially the Committee for Religious Affairs at the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus, which is pursuing no other policy but to support the strategy of the Belarusian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). All possible measures are being used toward this end: for example, the BGCC is accused of being an “agent of the Belarusian Popular Front.” While Greek Catholic priests have indeed supported various forms of Belarus’s national and cultural renaissance, the spiritual resurgence of the nation has always been their first and foremost goal.
Today, the BGCC numbers 30 parishes and about 10,000 believers.
It appears that the efforts to destroy the church are achieving success. What else can one expect, since this church, which has been destroyed for centuries, is opposed by the mighty alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church and the pro-Moscow government of Belarus?
This sad story should be a warning for Ukrainians: if they do not come to their senses in time, something similar may also happen to their churches, and quite soon at that.
The author used materials from The Martyr’s Path of the BGCC by Sergey Ablameyko.
