Religious War’ in Ukraine, Orthodox Assert
Published: August 23, 1990
MOSCOW, Aug. 22 — Russian Orthodox leaders accused Ukrainian Catholics today of waging a ”religious war” against them, including attacks on churches and hostage-taking.
At a news conference in Moscow, Orthodox bishops said that about 1,000 of the Eastern Rite Catholics attacked Orthodox clerics and then seized a church last week in Lvov.
”We Orthodox in the Ukraine find ourselves in an extreme situation, and to put it mildly, we are in a religious war,” Bishop Andrei of Lvov said.
The bishops, speaking at Moscow’s Danilov Monastery, accused the Catholics of holding priests hostage on Aug. 12 while they took over Lvov’s St. George Cathedral, confiscated from them when Stalin banned the Ukrainian Catholics in 1946.
”On Aug. 12, a mob of Uniates rushed into the church yard and broke the windows at St. George,” Bishop Andrei said. ”I was taken to my residence and held there for four days.”
There is now a repetition of Stalinist methods against the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine,” Bishop Cyrill of Kaliningrad said.
Ukrainian Catholic leaders in Lvov could not be reached for comment.
Stalin disbanded the Ukrainian Church in 1946, accusing it of collaborating with Nazi occupiers in the war, and handed its churches and property to the Orthodox Church, whose leaders stood by him in World War II.
Millions of Catholics were forced underground, but the new political climate under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has allowed them to begin regaining control of their churches.
The Catholics have also received a spur for full restoration of their property from radical reformers sympathetic to the Catholic cause who were swept into office in the Ukraine in March elections.
The Lvov City Council adopted a resolution on Aug. 14 authorizing the return of the cathedral to the Ukrainian Catholics, according to Orthodox church leaders.
Ukrainian Catholics consider St. George’s the seat of their church and the dispute over ownership had come to symbolize their battle with the Russian Orthodox authorities over the return of hundreds of churches, monasteries and other buildings used by Catholics before 1946.
The Orthodox leadership said recent events proved that negotiations between the Kremlin and the Vatican over the last year had not reduced religious tension in the Soviet Union.
Warming relations between Moscow and the Vatican have accelerated return of Ukrainian church property. Pope John Paul II has made full recognition a condition for a visit to Moscow and establishment of diplomatic ties.