Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Ukrainian Orthodox Parish During the War

The Expository Times, 2022

The war in Ukraine that began in February 2014 and escalated in February 2022 to the extent unseen in Europe since the World War II, cannot be adequately comprehended without taking into consideration its religious dimension. This article explores the evolution of the “Russian world” ideology, which the leaders and speakers of the Russian Orthodox Church render in quasi-theological terms. It explains why the Russian patriarch Kirill decided to back it and turned it from an elitist to mass ideologeme. These explanations are given in the sociological framework of the public space, social contract, and civil religion. The main argument of the article is that the church wanted to regain for itself a central place in the Russian public square after the decades of exile from it under the Communist regime. In result of supporting the war, however, the church is endangered to be marginalised in this square again.

ZOiS Report 6, 2024

Russia’s war against Ukraine has changed Ukraine’s religious landscape. Due to its ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), once the biggest Christian denomination in the country, has faced declining membership, public scrutiny and restrictive government policies. This report focuses on the perspectives of rank-and-file UOC members regarding public disapproval of their church. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with priests and parishioners in nine parishes in 2024, it provides insights into the mood within the UOC and its members’ (un)willingness to change their religious practices and affiliation against the backdrop of growing anti-Russian sentiment in Ukrainian society

Journal of Orthodox Christian studies, 2018

Przegląd Zachodni, Journal of the Institute of Western Affairs in Poznań, Special Issue, 2019

The aim of the article is to analyse the place and importance of the Orthodox Church in the society and political culture of Ukraine after 2013. The new political realities following the Revolu-tion of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas created new challenges for the Or-thodox Church in Ukraine. Particularly important is the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church’s authority over the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.At the turn of 2018 and 2019, by a decision of Patriarch Bartholomew I and with the support of the Ukrainian political authorities, a new reality became fact in Ukrainian Orthodoxy. However, the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (as a metropolis) does not mean that the split has been overcome. There will be two hostile, equal and comparably strong structures in Ukraine, politically backed by Ukraine and Russia, and this will draw those countries into conflicts over their religious structures and the wealth that their communities possess. At this stage, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine will rely primarily on the potential of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate, and this fact in turn will hinder the transfer of bishops and priests associated with the Moscow Patriarchate. The rift will be difficult to repair.

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Annotation The object of the study is provided by the conflict of interests of the Ukrainian society and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-(MP) against the backdrop of the 2022 full-scale Russian war against Ukraine. The article considers the impact of new legislative initiatives aimed at minimizing the destructive Russian influence, including on the religious area. The main content and contradictions of certain points of the Decree of the Council of the UOC (MP) dated May 27, 2022, as a result of which the religious denomination declared independence from the Moscow Patriarchate, are analyzed. The main reasons for the rejection of the Moscow Patriarchate by the UOC and their influence on the decisions of church leaders are identified. Also included are the independent decisions of more than 400 UOC parishes to transfer to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. In the context of illustrating the reasons for the refusal and contradictions, certain facts of the destruction by the Russian army of churches in Ukraine subordinate to the UOC-MP (friendly fire) are pointed out. This study is aimed at establishing the motives, results, and consequences of rethinking the subordination of one's own religious activity to a denomination that, despite its dependence on the Moscow Patriarchate, is actively functioning in Ukraine during the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, 2022

The relevance of the study is provided by the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, more specifically, the hybrid nature of the war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine since 2014. The use of information technologies along with military force, among other things, provides for the involvement of the churches of the Moscow Patriarchate as an additional tool for the spread of destructive ideological influence in Ukraine. Attention to the non-religious influence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) on Ukrainian society is being updated against the background of the ideological confrontation between the Russian and Ukrainian worldview systems in the religious plane. The article presents the factors initiating the distribution of the Orthodox Patriarchate in independent Ukraine, highlights the elements of fundamental differences for Ukraine between the Orthodox Church of the Ukraine (OCU) and the UOC-MP, and considers the actual ways to eliminate problems associated with the functioning of the UOC-MP in Ukraine during the current Russian-Ukrainian war. In addition, some facts of collaborationism carried out by representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine since the annexation of Crimea and the territories of Donbass since 2014 have been studied. A parallel is drawn between the facts of cooperation with the invaders during the full-scale war of 2022 and the statements of Russian priests who give a public assessment of Russian military operations in Ukraine.

Published on the website of the Foreign Policy Research Institute., 2017

This essay is adapted from the 21th Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs delivered on November 7, 2017, at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022

2020

Full text for the Ecumenical Research Conference «Ukraine: Die Orthodoxe Kirche vor einem Schisma?» at the Katholische Academie in Bayern, München 7-8.02.2020

Drawing on the methodological insights of scholars such as James C. Scott, William Fletcher, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, the author, by means of research into Soviet archives, correspondence, and synodal documents and other sources, has uncovered many details of how Bishop Feodosii Kovernynsky and Archbishop Palladii Kaminsky not merely survived but in many cases actively and repeatedly subverted the restrictions placed upon their episcopal ministry in several Ukrainian dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church from the late 1940s until the late 1970s. Shlikhta looks in particular at daily practices of these two men (e.g., redistricting of parish boundaries; promoting to priestly ranks of those who were often locally established deacons or laypeople not hand-picked by the state to be priests; publishing prayer books in Ukrainian rather than Russian as an ostensible tool to help “Uniates” integrate into the official Russian Church more easily) to discover their subaltern strategies, which, while not always rising to the level of mass protest, major manifestos demanding rights, or similarly dramatic defiance of the regime, were nonetheless effective. The portrait that emerges significantly complicates the previous narrative of “two churches” whereby there was an officious and ideologically subservient church under complete communist domination on the one hand, and a rebellious, illegal underground church on the other. These two bishops reveal various quotidian strategies by which they demonstrated how it was possible to be rebellious within the officially permitted structures of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine in the postwar period.