The war in Ukraine has caused a lasting and protracted geopolitical rift between the Euro-Atlantic community and Putin’s Russia. It is now a proven fact whose reverberations will be felt for a long time to come, not only in the purely political sphere, but also in the religious sphere. This societal aspect, essential to the understanding of human behavior and collective mentalities envisaged in the long term, all the more important to understand in situations of crises carrying existential anxieties, is most often forgotten or passed over in silence by the main press organs of a West proud to be dechristianized, secular and consumerist, which remains paradoxically nostalgic, despite everything, for an elusive transcendence.
The Eastern Catholic Churches (Uniate Churches) are the Eastern Rite component of the Catholic Church. They are characterized by the fact of being in communion with the bishop of Rome, that is to say Pope Francis, whose primacy they recognize, and by the splendor and deployment of the Eastern liturgical rites. They are defined in Catholic terminology as self-governing Churches or “Churches of Proper Right”, in the legal sense and are considered to be fully the Catholic Church. According to figures from the Pontifical Yearbook, they have 18 million faithful in all, or 1.5% of Catholics, who number more than 1.2 billion.
The word “Uniate” has long been used to designate the Eastern Catholic Churches. In the strict sense, it is used to designate the fractions of these Eastern Churches which broke with their Orthodox “mother” Church and entered into communion with the Catholic Church. Today mainly used by the Orthodox, it most often has a pejorative connotation. These Churches have often been Latinized. Keeping Eastern appearances, however, they adopted Catholic theology and ecclesiology. They often think of themselves as a bridge between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is one of the Eastern Catholic Churches.
The Greek Catholic Church is the third largest Church in Ukraine with almost 8% of the population. There are two other Catholic Churches in Ukraine (both united with Rome): the Latin Rite Catholic Church and the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church.
In this context, after the initial dithering in the aftermath of the Russian aggression in Ukraine, following the belligerent stances of the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, Pope Francis and the Holy See adopted an increasingly critical attitude towards the support granted by the Russian Orthodox Church to President Putin’s so-called special military operation in Ukraine.
The first collateral victim of this progressive institutional cooling was the ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox and their respective authorities: inspired by John Paul II, set in motion by Benedict XVI and above all deepened, in a promising way, by Francis (notably with the Declaration of Cuba in 2016), this one is, for the moment frozen, following his hard-hitting comment qualifying Kirill “of choir boy of President Putin”.
Obviously, the Moscow Patriarchate considered the pope’s remarks “regrettable”. In response, the meeting between Patriarch Kirill and the Pope, scheduled for June 2022, was by mutual agreement postponed to an unspecified date.
Pope Francis therefore allowed the Vatican diplomats to express themselves more on this thorny subject while retaining the possibility of engaging directly in direct mediation between the belligerents of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, according to the principles of neutrality and equidistance. dear to the Holy See.
The present war, it is worth emphasizing, has also provoked a veritable earthquake between the Orthodox Churches in the two countries, even within the communion of Orthodox Churches on a world scale.
Orthodox theologians around the world have thus condemned the Patriarch of Moscow’s adherence to the notion of the Russian sphere of influence (Russki Mir), calling it totalitarian and heretical.
This accusation of heresy was taken up by Cardinal Koch, prefect of the dicastery for the promotion of Christian unity and responsible for the management of the Ukrainian file for the diplomacy of the Holy See; the latter indeed criticized Kirill in an unusually sharp way.
“It is heresy that the patriarch dares to legitimize the brutal and senseless war in Ukraine for pseudo-religious reasons,” the cardinal said in an interview with the German newspaper. Die Tagespost, according Catholic Observer dated June 29.
“To call Putin’s war of brutal aggression a ‘special operation’, as Russia has described it, is a misnomer,” Cardinal Koch said. I must condemn this description as “an absolutely unacceptable position”.
“The pseudo-religious justification of war by Patriarch Kirill must shake any ecumenical heart,” said Cardinal Koch, adding that, from a Christian perspective, “one cannot justify aggressive war, but at most, in certain conditions, defense against an unjust aggressor”.
All the same, the conclusion remains to this day elusive. According to the latest information from the Vatican news agency, the pope is indeed considering again a possible trip to promote the cause of peace between kyiv and Moscow. He points out in this regard: “And now it is possible, after my return from Canada, that I can go to Ukraine. The first thing to do is to go to Russia to try to help in one way or another, but I would like to go to both capitals,” the pope clarified. Story to follow…