Abolishing the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

In the course of the war, the status of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) within the USSR changed “from a probationary servant to junior partner of the state.”⁷⁶ The ROC sought, with the government’s help, to expand its authority at the expense of its religious rivals.

In addition to the 4.3 million Greek Catholics who lived in those areas the USSR formally annexed in November 1939, 2 million Roman Catholics, 1.5 million Orthodox Christians, and 800,000 Jews also resided there.⁷⁷ With the decimation of the Jewish population during the war and the in­voluntary repatriation of the Poles and surviving Jews after the war, the Soviet authorities perceived the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as the greatest threat to their totalitarian aspirations.

Like all Catholic institutions in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Greek Catholic Church had to manoeuvre deftly between its moral demands and institu­tional imperatives in a fluid and oftentimes chaotic political environment. The overwhelming majority of its faithful lived in Galicia, a part of the General Government. The German authorities favoured the Greek Catholic Church over the Polish Roman Catholic Church, which they actively persecuted.

As early as the first Soviet occupation of Galicia in 1939-41, Stalin’s em­issaries covertly started the process of converting the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to Orthodoxy but did not officially tip their hand. During the Soviet reoccupation of Galicia and the occupation of Transcarpathia in 1944, the state security and party apparatus assembled the materials neces­sary to “prove” that the Greek Catholic Church had “collaborated” with the Nazi occupation authorities and their “allies,” the OUN and the UPA.⁷⁹ In the first months after the return of Soviet power, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church did not experience persecution, primarily because of the Communist Party’s concentration on winning the war and its efforts to initiate a diplomatic relationship with the Vatican, which increasingly ex­pressed anti-Soviet positions.⁸⁰ In this period, the Communist Party of Ukraine urged the Church to help undermine UPA resistance and per­suade the insurgents to accept the three amnesties the Soviet government offered in 1944-5.

Only after the death of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky on 1 November 1944 did the Soviet government and ROC’s Patriarch Alexius begin to pressure the Greek Catholic bishops and priests to break with Rome and to join the Russian Orthodox Church.⁸¹ Joseph Slipy, Sheptytsky’s suc­cessor, and his colleagues unanimously rejected this demand. In April and May 1945, the NKVD detained Slipy, five other bishops, and several prominent priests who refused to convert.

Shortly after the arrest of the church hierarchy, Alexius and the NKVD stage-managed the creation of an “initiative” group for Greek Catholic- Russian Orthodox reconciliation.

With the symbolic support of the majority of the church’s priests, Kostelnyk’s initiative group organized a synod in March 1946, formally abandoning the Ukrainian religious institution’s ties with Rome (which had existed since 1596), and officially returned “to the Holy Orthodox faith of our forefathers.”⁸⁴ During this process, all of the imprisoned Greek Catholic bishops refused to accept this “reunion.”

The OUN also denounced the synod’s decision. Although the OUN leaders did not enjoy close ties to the church, they defended it in the im­mediate post-war period.⁸⁵ In July 1946 they threatened to execute those converted priests who would not repudiate their decisions and killed doz­ens. On 20 September 1948, the OUN assassinated Kostelnyk.⁸⁶

In response to this ecclesiastical and secular resistance, Alexius estab­lished his own Orthodox hierarchy in Western Ukraine. He and the Soviet authorities applied their coercive measures in other areas and achieved comparable results. Similar religious mergers took place in Carpatho- Ukraine and in the Presov/Priashiv region of Czechoslovakia. Many of the faithful boycotted the ROC, and priests secretly continued to conduct Catholic services. The Greek Catholic Church remained active in the un­derground until its re-legalization under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989.

The Greek Catholic Church possessed strong roots in the local popula­tion and their allegiance to Rome. Stalin understood that these Christian believers would be difficult to integrate into the new Soviet order. Unlike the Ukrainians nurtured in an Orthodox environment, those raised in the Greek Catholic Church possessed a very significant internal component in differentiating themselves from the Russians. This psychological marker could easily be activated against the Soviet state. In the party leader’s anal­ysis of the problem, the bitter struggle with Ukrainian nationalism neces­sitated the abolition of the Greek Catholic Church in Western Ukraine.⁸⁷ Whereas the tsarist authorities failed to do so in 1914-15, Stalin did not.