Tue, 15 Apr 2014 | Cover | Page 08

Brest, not Balamand

By Gabriel S. Sanchez

Thehistory of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), one of two sui iuris churches created by the 1595/96 agreement known as the Union of Brest (the other being the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church), has been fraught with difficulties. [Brest was the decision of the Ruthenian Church of Rus’, the "Metropolia of Kiev-Halych and all Rus’", to break relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople and enter into communion with and place itself under the authority of the Pope of Rome.] Fiercely opposed from its inception by the Russian Orthodox Church, many of the heirs of Brest were deceptively, or forcibly, reunited with the Russian Orthodox beginning in the late 18th C. and culminating in the utterly tragic 1946 "L’viv Sobor"—a bogus council staged by the Soviet Union’s puppet Moscow Patriarchate (MP) and kept in check by Stalin’s secret police— which purportedly abrogated the Union of Brest and abolished the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Driven underground for decades, Ukraine’s Catholics, Slavo-Byzantine in rite and loyal to the Pope, were finally granted the freedom to openly practice their faith following the historic meeting between Pope John Paul II and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on December 1, 1989. Though some had estimated that the number of Ukrainian Catholics in the Soviet Union remained in the tens of thousands, the joyous reality was that over 1,000 Ukrainian clergy came forward along with five million faithful. Truly the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Nicholas, patron of Greek Catholics, had watched over the beleaguered Ukrainian Church during its time in the catacombs.

Astonishingly, the brave Catholic souls of Ukraine and Russia had yet to experience five years of freedom before the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, headed by now-Cardinal Walter Kasper and including a representative from the MP, backed the so-called "Balamand Declaration"(named after the Orthodox’s Balamand School of Theology in Lebanon) which, inter alia, repudiated "Uniatism," the (sometimes pejorative) name given to the Catholic Church’s process of seeking reunification with its estranged eastern brethren that began at Brest and met with noticeable success in other parts of the globe up until the early 20th C.

Though the Balamand Declaration lacks binding force, it is routinely held up by ecumenists as an absolute prohibition against Catholic proselytism of Orthodox (though not the other way around). While some hoped Balamand would help thaw relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church, it was not to be. John Paul II’s hopes of visiting Russia were dashed by the MP and indeed no Patriarch of Moscow has yet to agree to meet with any Roman Pontiff. Meanwhile, the MP has remained strident in its public stand against Roman primacy in the Church while freely talking out of both sides of its mouth with respect to strengthening Catholic/Orthodox ties.

Of course, the Balamand Declaration was not the Catholic Church’s first ecumenical blunder vis-à-vis the Orthodox. As Roberto de Mattei details in his The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story, the desire of some Roman churchmen to win MP participation at Vatican II resulted in a clandestine deal whereby the Soviets were assured that the Council Fathers would take no strong stand against communism in exchange for the greenlight to be given for Moscow’s ageing Patriarch, Alexius, to dispatch two of his priests to Rome. Embarrassingly, the immediate fruits of this unholy pact was acrimony among the other Orthodox patriarchates, including accusations that Rome was attempting to divide the Orthodox Church against itself. According to Mattei, it was only after Pope Paul VI’s meeting with Athenagoras, Patriarch of Constantinople, that the situation was defused. Sadly, all of this transpired at a time when Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, the rightful head of the UGCC, was languishing in a Russian gulag as millions of his flock practiced their faith clandestinely for fear of bloody reprisals. Now, fast-forward to the Euromaidan demonstrations which began in Ukraine last November. Without delving too deeply into the complex series of political grievances and power struggles which remain at the heart of that movement and the coinciding call for Ukraine to deepen its integration with the European Union at the expense of its historic ties to Russia, the protests, along with the Russian state’s subsequent annexation of Crimea in southern Ukraine, has ignited Russian Orthodox recriminations against the UGCC and a fresh round of persecutions. Since the annexation of Crimea, all of the region’s Catholic clergy, save one priest and a deacon, have left after intimidation by Russian forces. At the same time, the Catholic faithful have been urged by their leaders to remove themselves to Ukrainian-controlled territory due to heightened concerns over arrest and property seizures.

While some apologists for the Russian Church view the Crimean situation as an isolated matter bound up with its Russian-speaking majority’s desire for unity with Russia, the Russian Church’s rhetoric says otherwise. Since the start of the Euromaidan, Ukraine’s Catholic population has been routinely blamed by Russian authorities for instigating the protests. Moreover, the alignment of some Ukrainian Catholics with the country’s two leading farright nationalist parties has opened the door for Russian propagandists to mischaracterize those movements as "neo-Nazi" and thus, by extension, suggesting that Ukrainian Catholics are neo-Nazis as well. More troubling than this childish name-calling, however, is the openly prejudicial attitude of the MP toward the UGCC. In an interview published on the Russian Orthodox Church’s official website, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfayev, the MP’s leading theologian and potential heir to the Patriarchal throne, had this to say:

To sum up the theme of the Uniates or Greek Catholics, in fact, from Rome’s point of view, the Uniates should serve as a bridge between East and West.

Actually, this project was conceived as such. But this special project of the Catholic Church has always been perceived by the Orthodox extremely negatively because, as a matter of fact, the Uniates are people who wear Orthodox clothes, observe Orthodox rites while remaining Catholic.

In these lines one finds the classic conflation of rite and religious identity which many in the Orthodox Church have clung to for centuries. From the Russian Orthodox perspective, as articulated by Alfayev, all Christians who practice the Slavo-Byzantine Rite belong to them by right and their union with the Church of Rome is ipso facto invalid. The irony of that erroneous view is that the MP was the first Orthodox jurisdiction to manufacture and establish an "Orthodox Western Rite" in Europe and the United States which, in large part, borrows from Roman Rite worship while clumsily mixing in Byzantine and long-defunct Western liturgical elements. Following Alfayev’s reasoning, shouldn’t Orthodoxy’s Western Rite parishes belong, by right, to the Roman Church? But really, the truly disturbing aspect of the MP’s attitude is its parochialism and ethnocentrism. Have the Russian Orthodox forgotten that the Church is supposed to be universal and not circumscribed geographically or ritualistically (so long as the ritual properly expresses the Faith)? The UGCC, along with the 21 other Eastern sui iuris churches, is a witness to the catholicity of the Church, not a cultural ornament.

The full unveiling of the MP’s negative stance toward the UGCC in the light of the unsettling political situation in Ukraine should give all Catholics, particularly traditional Catholics, reason to seriously question the unilateral dissolution of "Uniatism" in the wake of Balamand. Between ethnic pride and historical animosity, it should be clear that the MP has no intention of "playing ball" with Rome nor allowing the UGCC to thrive on "its territory" if it can help it. With the Russian Orthodox Church being so far gone from ecumenical dialogue at this point, would it not be better, in the interest mending the Great Schism stich-by-stich, for the Catholic Church as a whole and the UGCC in particular to open the door once again to those Eastern Orthodox who also long for the Church to be truly one?

In fact, is not Rome carrying out this very project in its own backyard under Pope Benedict XVI’s Anglicanorum Coetibus? Although this project of "Anglican Uniatism"—to borrow Fr.

Aidan Nichols’ expression—has come packaged with certain difficulties, the far older enterprise of "Eastern Uniatism," with its preservation of the ancient liturgy, spirituality, and theology of the Christian East, should be seen as a means of restoring the universal Church’s alignment with tradition.

Traditional Catholicism, a movement which has largely, though not exclusively, been associated with those faithful who follow the Roman Rite would do well to support the UGCC and, from there, to call for the rebirth of "Eastern Uniatism." With the Catholic Church still in the midst of a painful doctrinal and liturgical crisis, even incremental reunion with separated Eastern Christians, many of whom carry a strong fidelity to the historic principles which once united all of Christendom, can only strengthen the Mystical Body of Christ. For too long Rome, intoxicated by false ecumenism, has capitulated to the Orthodox while ignoring those heroic Catholics of the East who were supposed to be under her protection. The spirit of Balamand is the spirit of selling out; the spirit of Brest, and the "Uniate" accords which followed, is the true spirit of catholicity in union with Christ’s words, "That they all may be one…and there shall be one fold and one shepherd" (John 17:21). ■

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No Communion in the hand here. A Ukrainian Greek Catholic Mass at the pilgrimage to the miraculous icon of 'Halytska' in the village of Krylos, Ukraine, July 29, 2012. (CNS photo)