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The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Contemporary USSR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Bohdan R. Bociurkiw
Bohdan R. Bociurkiw*
Affiliation:
Carleton University, Ottawa
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Extract

In 1944, the Soviet Army recaptured Galicia and Transcarpathia from the Germans, and the last stronghold of Ukrainian Greek Catholicism fell under Soviet control. Following the arrests of all Uniate bishops and of the “recalcitrant” clergy, the Lviv Sobor of March 1946 nullified the 1596 Union of Brest, which first established the Greek Catholic Church, and forcibly “reunified” the Uniates with the state-controlled Russian Orthodox Church. The post-World War II period saw the gradual suppression of the Uniate Church throughout Carpatho-Ukraine, Poland, and Eastern Slovakia, and marked the beginning of more than four decades of struggle for Eastern Rite Ukrainian Catholics in the USSR to maintain their banned Church against the overpowering alliance of the Soviet regime and the Russian Orthodox Church. Despite the enforced “reunification,” the Greek Catholic Church has remained the most important cultural and institutional preserve of national identity in Western Ukraine. The following is an examination of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's attempts to assert its right to legal existence since the beginning of political and social revitalization under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Type
Part I: Christian Communities
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 20 , Issue 1: Special Issue - Religious Consciousness In The Glasnost Era , Spring 1992 , pp. 17 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

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