Vatican, Kremlin at Odds Over Pope’s Desire to Visit U.S.S.R.

The Vatican and the Kremlin are at odds over Pope John Paul II’s lobbying for an invitation to visit the Soviet Union this year.

No Pope has ever gone to the Soviet Union, and it is not considered likely that John Paul will go, either. If he is turned down, it could affect Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s plans for a state visit to Italy.

Underlying the public maneuvering, according to Vatican officials, is the question of whether Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost , or openness, extends to greater tolerance for human rights, specifically freedom of worship.

Gorbachev’s plans for a visit to Italy this year are complicated by what the Pope wants. Most foreign leaders who call officially on Italy also see the Pope, and the customary courtesies include an invitation for a reciprocal papal visit.

Gorbachev could come to Italy and bypass the Pope, but it would look bad, and he might be asked publicly to explain why.

The Vatican and the Kremlin have no formal ties, but they are not strangers to each other. Over the years high-level Soviet officials have been received routinely by the Pope as an adjunct of their visits to Italy, a country that intrigues and alarms the Soviets as the home of the largest Communist Party in the West.

John Paul’s longstanding interest in the Soviet Union is quickened this year by scheduled midyear observances of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in what is now the Ukraine. Church specialists say that as many as 4 million Ukrainian Catholics clandestinely practice their faith today, even though their religion is officially suppressed.

“In the Ukraine bishops, priests, nuns, monks and the faithful literally take to the woods to hear Mass,” said Father John F. Long, a Rome-based American Jesuit who specializes in Soviet affairs.

Most of the Soviet Union’s 50 million Christians are members of the Russian Orthodox Church, which cooperates with the government, but there are sizable communities of Roman Catholics who worship, with government sanction, in the Soviet republics of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.

As a clear measure of his concern, the Pope has publicly raised the issue of the church in the Soviet Union on three separate occasions this year.

In a New Year’s address, he asked for prayers for people in the Soviet Union and East Europe who suffer for the sake of their beliefs.

Three weeks later he announced the imminent publication of two apostolic letters. One is for the “sister” Orthodox Church, which broke from Rome in the 11th Century but has joined in talks with the Vatican looking to eventual reunification. The second letter will be for the Ukrainian faithful, “obedient to the voice of their conscience.”

The Pope’s most direct appeal for an invitation to the Soviet Union came the other day in response to a question asked at a meeting with members of the Foreign Press Assn. of Rome.

“Such a trip would not only be important from a religious point of view, but also from the perspective of international coexistence,” the Pope said. “It should be a true visit, in response to a true invitation. This invitation has not yet arrived.”

John Paul lamented that the Ukrainian church “is almost clandestine, outlawed, recognized in recent years as non-existent.” The fidelity of Ukrainian Catholics, he said, “obliges me to be equally faithful to them.” Any visit to the Soviet Union, he made plain, must be more than ceremonial, allowing him access to Catholic communities there.

“In the Soviet view,” the Jesuit Long said, “the Ukrainian church is irredentist, a church of resistance aligned to nationalist and separatist movements which Gorbachev has condemned.”

Abolished by Stalin

The Ukrainian church, abolished by Stalin in 1946 amid ferocious repression, has survived underground. Lately, eased repression has allowed about 10 bishops and more than 100 priests to function semi-clandestinely. In 1985, John Paul named Myroslav I. Lubachivsky, a naturalized U.S. citizen, as cardinal of Lvov in the Ukraine, but he lives in exile in Rome.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro said last week there has been no Soviet response “direct or indirect” to the Pope’s expressed desire for an invitation, but the word from Moscow in recent weeks has been less than friendly.

“As far as we know, the question of the Pope’s visit to the U.S.S.R. is not subject to any discussions,” Gennady I. Gerasimov, a spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, said after the Pope’s remarks to the Foreign Press Assn. here.

A few days later, there was circulated in Rome an Italian translation of an article from the Soviet newspaper Izvestia attacking the Ukrainian church for its alleged cooperation with the Nazis during World War II and, before that, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ostensibly, the article was in response to human rights concerns voiced by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.).

Since then, the Soviet news agency Novosti has scored the Vatican for its anti-communism and the Pope for “encouraging a nationalist and anti-socialist state of mind” on his visit to Poland last year.

Ukrainian dissidents in Moscow told the British news agency Reuters in January that Soviet officials had rejected a written appeal by their church for formal recognition. Vatican spokesman Navarro said the Vatican had received no independent confirmation of the rejection.

“As far as we are concerned,” he said, “it is business as usual.”

In this context, business as usual means that the Pope is not likely to be leaving soon for the Soviet Union, and that it may be longer than Gorbachev would like before he visits Italy.