Webinar on Liquidation of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Held

In a webinar on the 1946 liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Father Taras Bublyk, researcher at the Institute of History of the Church of UCU, said the Soviet authority did not intend to coexist with the Greek Catholic Church because it considered the church part of the anti-Soviet system. According to Fr. Taras, in September 1939 the Greek Catholic Church represented a very strong structure, which included the Lviv Archeparchy, Stanislav and Peremyshliany dioceses, and the apostolic administration in Lemkivshchyna. The church had 2,387 parishes and 3.6 million faithful. It had 2,352 diocesan priests, 31 male and 121 female monasteries and monastic houses, theological academy and 3 seminaries with a total of 480 students. Despite severe persecution of the church during the first Soviet occupation in 1939-1941, when the Soviet regime regained power in 1944 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, seeing a change in Joseph Stalin’s attitude to the Russian Orthodox Church, sought to establish constructive relations with the authorities. After the death of the metropolitan, his successor, Patriarch Joseph, continued to work on the relationship. As a result, in 1944–1945 the leaders issued two pastoral letters urging to stop the armed struggle and the church collected 100 thousand rubles for the needs of the Red Cross and sent an official delegation to Moscow. Instead, the Soviet authority unleashed an information war against the church, and on April 11, 1945, it arrested the head of the church along with the entire episcopate, established a work group on "reunifying" the Church with the Russian Orthodox Church, and in March 1946 held a pseudo-synod liquidating the Greek Catholic Church. Fr. Taras said that the priests were brought to the city by force under a police escort and in complete secrecy. "Since the synod was convened by arbitrarily chosen priests who were no longer Greek Catholics, the event cannot be considered canonical, and its resolution not legitimate," said Fr. Taras. The webinar can be viewed at the following link: www.ugcc.org.ua/webinars/2010-12-08.flv (50:03 min., 30 Mb).

Information Department of the UGCC