Pope Welcomes Bishops ‘From the Catacombs’ : Ukraine: The clerics had preserved their faith underground until Gorbachev legalized it.

VATICAN CITY —  Pope John Paul II on Monday bade an emotional welcome to leaders of a Ukrainian church “emerging from the catacombs” and urged them to make peace with the rival Russian Orthodox Church as fruit of the peaceful revolution sweeping through the Soviet Union.

The Pope met and chatted individually for an hour with 10 bishops who had come from the Ukraine, where they had preserved their faith outside the law, heading a church driven underground by dictator Josef Stalin in 1946. John Paul asked about the hardships they had endured, his spokesman said.

Many of the Ukrainians had never before left the Soviet Union. Five had served time in jail. All but one had been consecrated bishops in hiding, and all had practiced their faith behind the backs of Soviet police.

One worked as a medical orderly, another as a collective farm laborer, a third as a fish smoker, a fourth as a professor of physics. Another 300 priests also worked clandestinely in the Soviet Union until liberalization under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev allowed them to surface.

John Paul had never met any of the bishops, according to Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro, who described their encounter as highly emotional.

“This is a great moment in history for the Ukrainian Catholic church,” said Sonya Hlutkowsky, a spokesman for the Ukrainian church here. “Waiting this morning to meet the Pope, they were all very emotional, excited, anxious. It was the highlight of their lives.”

The 10 “secret” bishops of the so-called Uniate church are meeting here at the invitation of the Pope with 18 Ukrainian Catholic bishops from around the world. It is the first full encounter of leaders of their Eastern Rite church in nearly half a century.

“We have prayed fervently and sacrificed unceasingly that this happy moment might come, and we longed for this day to dawn,” said Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky, leader in exile of an estimated 4 million Catholic Ukrainians who remain faithful to Rome.

Four of the 18 “diaspora” bishops hail from the United States--from Parma, Ohio, Chicago, Philadelphia and Stamford, Conn. Their Rome-based cardinal-patriarch also travels with an American passport.

Addressing the Ukrainian prelates at the opening of their two-day meeting here, John Paul hailed the “important moral and social changes” in the Soviet Union “which have led to the recognition of the right to religious freedom” and allowed the Ukrainian church to “emerge from the catacombs.” His reference was to early Catholics in Rome who, while under persecution, worshiped and buried their dead in labyrinthine caverns outside the city.

Now again free to practice its faith, the Uniate Church is fighting to recover properties--and believers--lost to the government-obedient Russian Orthodox Church. The Uniates angrily walked out of a reconciliation meeting in March.

On Monday, the Pope told them to again seek peace with an Orthodox church that broke from Rome in the 11th Century.

“This reconciliation is one of the first jobs of the church today,” John Paul told the Uniate bishops, urging them to become “a bridge to unity--a bridge, and not in any way an obstacle.”

The rebirth of the Uniate Church and its squabble with the Orthodox Church, comes, the Pope made plain, in the context of a Europe that, divided ideologically after World War II, is regaining its “organic unity.” The Ukraine and its religious travails, he stressed, is one part of a much larger whole.

“The Catholic Church feels itself responsible for the future of Europe,” the Pope noted.

Responding to the Pope, Cardinal Lubachivsky echoed a call for reconciliation that has encountered grass-roots resistance among Ukrainian Uniates demanding the return of property ranging from churches and schools to orphanages and property.