Ukrainian Prelate Asks Reagan Not to Visit Moscow Monastery

The exiled head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church appealed to President Reagan on Tuesday to cancel plans to visit a historic monastery during his trip to Moscow later this month, contending that such a visit would appear to give Western sanction to the Kremlin’s control of religious worship.

Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky, who spoke to reporters after attending a White House meeting on religion in the Soviet Union, said Reagan told him he is committed to visit the 700-year-old Danilov Monastery. The cardinal said Reagan promised to convey to Soviet leader Mikhail A. Gorbachev the importance the United States attaches to freedom of worship.

Lubachivsky said he implored Reagan to “reconsider his trip to the Danilov Monastery at this time,” particularly because the visit will coincide with official observation of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in what is now the Soviet Union.

Western emigre groups and human rights activists in the Soviet Union argue that Moscow is using its celebration of the millennium to project an image of religious tolerance that is belied by the failure to release more than 150 religious prisoners still held in labor camps.

In addition, Lubachivsky said Moscow is usurping a historic anniversary that is rightfully Ukrainian, not Russian. By tradition, it was Prince Vladimir of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, who accepted Christianity in AD 988, long before the Russian princes of Moscow emerged as a power and accepted Christianity themselves.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church, for generations a wellspring of nationalist sentiment, was banned by Josef Stalin in 1946. According to Western authorities, it remains one of the most rigidly suppressed religious groups in the Soviet Union, in contrast to relative freedom allowed the state-sanctioned Orthodox Church.

Despite more than 40 years of effort by Moscow to extinguish the Ukrainian church, Lubachivsky said, 1,000 priests and 1,200 nuns, trained in underground cells, currently serve hundreds of thousands of the faithful.

Nevertheless, he said, since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the KGB has destroyed 150 unauthorized churches of Ukrainian Catholic congregations.

Lubachivsky was joined by two Russian Orthodox clerics. Vladimir Shibaev, who was recently allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union, and Victor S. Potapov, of Washington, said the monastery was being used as a showcase to impress Western visitors as an example of Gorbachev’s “liberal policies.”