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A Turn for the Worse?
The Russian Orthodox hierarchy sees the papal visit as the latest in a series of unwelcome challenges to Moscow’s jurisdiction.

“If the Vatican really does ignore the request to postpone the papal visit to Ukraine, things can’t improve,” Igor Vyzhanov told Keston News Service. The spokesman for Orthodox-Catholic relations at the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations added: “They are already getting worse and worse.”

In recent years Pope John Paul II has made official visits to the predominantly Orthodox countries of Romania and Georgia, but only with the support of the local Orthodox hierarchy. In the case of the scheduled papal visit to Ukraine this June, such agreement has not been sought. In his January written request to Pope John Paul II to postpone the visit, Ukrainian Orthodox Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan) argued that the visit could create the false impression that the conflict between Orthodox and Byzantine Catholics in West Ukraine had been resolved. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Aleksei II has repeatedly stated that this conflict, and proselytism by the Catholic Church in Russia, constitute the main obstacles to an improvement in Orthodox-Catholic relations.

However the chancellor of the Apostolic Administration for Catholics of European Russia, Father Igor Kovalevsky, questioned the validity of the arguments continually cited by the Russian Orthodox prelate. In Ukraine, in his view, the Moscow Patriarchate’s concerns about jurisdiction and authority within the Orthodox hierarchy are really problems that should be addressed with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, rather than the Catholic Church. Moreover, he maintained, the Catholic Church was not engaging in proselytism in Russia. “We are just trying to function normally in Russia and provide for our minority here,” he said. “If I proselytized in my parish then I would have three times as many parishioners.”

The reasons for the Moscow Patriarchate’s accusations, as understood by Russian Catholic clergy, are various. Father Kovalevsky cited a widespread “tribal” attitude toward religion, which suggests that “a Russian must be Orthodox; a Tatar, Muslim; a German, Lutheran.” A Byzantine Catholic priest, Father Andrei Udovenko, rejected the associated view that a Russian Catholic must therefore be the result of proselytism: 

If a person was baptized Orthodox but never went to church, then it is all right for him to become Catholic, and vice versa. If a person is truly Orthodox then he won’t leave. Orthodoxy can’t mean very much to him if he abandons it so readily.

Father Udovenko surmised that a weak Moscow Patriarchate fears a religious exodus in Russia similar to the one that occurred in West Ukraine in the early 1990s, when 600 Orthodox priests, all trained in Zagorsk, went over to the Ukrainian Catholic Church as soon as that Byzantine-rite body emerged from under the legal suppression imposed by the Communist regime. “They can’t have been trained well in the traditions of Orthodoxy if they switched as soon as they had the chance,” the Catholic priest argued. In his view, there was also a long-standing Orthodox prejudice against the Catholic Church—ironically encouraged by tsars of Protestant origin—as “politically Western, a tool of Western expansion.” This was not in fact the case, he maintained, since there were religious divisions even within the Western orbit. He cited the tensions between Polish and Ukrainian Catholics, and the history of religious warfare in western Europe. 

Moscow’s worries

According to Igor Vyzhanov, however, Catholics misunderstand Orthodox objections. He showed Keston a recent report from the Rome-based Catholic news agency Zenit, which claimed that “the Russian Orthodox Church is opposed to the presence of the Eastern rite in Orthodox lands and to the return of their property expropriated under Stalin.” Exclaimed Vyzhanov: “This is a lie!”

The Russian Orthodox official explained that the true concern of the Moscow Patriarchate regarding the religious tension in Ukraine is that “we are against the persecution of the Orthodox.” He explained: “The situation in West Ukraine is like in Northern Ireland, where the Catholics are the minority.” When told that during a recent visit to West Ukraine, Keston had been unable to find evidence of more than a handful of local conflicts between Catholic and Orthodox believers, Vyzhanov expressed genuine surprise. He remarked: “But our bishop there constantly tells us that there are problems.”

Turning to the issue of proselytism in Russia, Keston asked how Catholics could be accused of enticing believers away from their traditional Orthodox ties, when the current numbers of Catholics in Russia represent only a fraction of the Catholic strength prior to the 1917 revolution. Vyzhanov pointed out that “the picture has completely changed since then,” since the pre-revolutionary Russian empire included Lithuania, Belarus, and parts of Poland—all predominantly Catholic territories—while large numbers of ethnic German Catholics had emigrated from Russia since 1917, and the ethnic Poles remaining in the country are by now completely Russified. For all these reasons, he said, Catholic priests sent from Argentina or Mexico to reclaim old Catholic parishes in Russia today find 10 believers where there had once been 100.

However, Vyzhanov charged, those Catholic clergymen do their best to regain their old numerical strength. “They preach in the villages, force literature on people and soon they have their 100,” he said. He singled out the presence of missionary orders for special criticism: “If they are missionaries then they must be coming here specifically to convert people.”

When asked whether it was acceptable for a Mexican priest to press literature onto a Russian citizen with a Polish surname, but not one with a Russian surname, Vyzhanov deliberated for a few moments before replying that it was not. “It is still expansion,” he reasoned. “Why does he think the supposed Poles are waiting for him? They would have invited him themselves.” 

On the other hand, Vyzhanov did not equate the Catholic Church with the influence of the West, and he contrasted the Latin with the northern or Germanic Catholic tradition. “Here [in Russia] they talk about the West as if it were a homogenous unit, but England is completely different from Italy,” he observed. “We don’t have concrete problems with Catholics in Germany.” When Keston suggested to Vyzhanov that it was German Catholic foundations—not the Vatican—that had funded the construction of the many new Byzantine Catholic churches in West Ukraine, he appeared unconcerned. “Well, let them build, that’s their business,” he said.

The Moscow Patriarchate, maintained Vyzhanov, in no way wishes to claim “that a Russian must be Orthodox.” Rather, he said, “it is a question of jurisdiction.” He explained that behind the accusations of proselytism—but never openly discussed, because of the absence of theological dialogue between the two churches—there lies the theological question of the primacy of the pope:

Rome is a local Church, but it is set up higher—the Vatican considers the whole world its canonical territory. To us this position is unacceptable. The pope should just be the Bishop of Rome. 

An improvement in Orthodox-Catholic relations, Vyzhanov maintained, would manifest itself in productive discussions of such theological concerns.