The Church of Constantinople
Out of Byzantium The legacy of Constantine by Mark Raczkiewycz
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piritual leader of more than four million Ukrainian Greek Catholics worldwide, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk describes his role in familial terms. “My mission is to be a father to them, to assure them the church of Kiev takes care of them — a church that is reestablishing its own existence in the capital of Ukraine, yet is a global church,” he says, sitting in a conference room beside the modernistic, towering Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. Greek Catholics comprise nearly 9 percent of Ukraine’s population, about four million people, the majority of whom live in western Ukraine. Yet Ukrainian Greek Catholic parishes also flourish in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada and the United States; smaller communities may also be found in China and the United Arab Emirates. From 1946 until 1990, those Ukrainian Greek Catholics living
in the “diaspora” tenaciously maintained their faith even as the Soviets had eliminated their church back home. This resolve, this loyalty to uphold their identity, Archbishop Sviatoslav says, helped them to remain true “to their faith and to their Christian traditions.” These traditions are steeped in the Byzantine customs of the ancient church of Constantinople, from which they received the faith when the grand prince of the Rus’, Vladimir of Kiev, accepted Christianity in its Byzantine form and instructed his subjects to be baptized in the year 988. Growing up in the western Soviet Ukrainian region of Lviv, the 46-year-old prelate says, he had not expected to become a priest, let alone a bishop or the head of a church then in hiding. But he discovered his faith in the underground, where hundreds of thousands of people risked their lives on a daily basis to maintain
p Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk has led the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church since 2011. t A Greek Catholic priest blesses baskets of bread, cheese, eggs and ham Easter morning in Jakubany, Slovakia.
their Greek Catholic faith in defiance of government suppression. Their hope and strength of will empowered the church to carry on, the major archbishop adds. But he learned the true nature of sacrifice after joining an underground seminary: “I was taught that being a priest means to offer not only bread and wine, not only the blood and body of Christ, but to offer your own blood and your own flesh.” When Ukraine achieved its independence in 1991, about 300 priests surfaced from hiding to serve the needs of a faith community reeling from oppression and
OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF CNEWA
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