Welcome for Pope Is Mixed Blessing

Since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, few dreams have driven Pope John Paul II more passionately than that of a “total communion” between Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox churches that left the Vatican fold nearly 1,000 years ago.

But rather than speeding such a reunion, the end of the Cold War has, to his dismay, given rise to bitter rivalry between Orthodox and Catholic communities in the former Soviet bloc that are reemerging from decades of Communist rule.

Wednesday, as the 81-year-old Catholic leader ended a five-day visit to Ukraine, the country most squarely astride this religious fault line, it was doubtful that even his scaled-down ambition merely to visit all the Orthodox lands and make his case for unity will be attainable in his lifetime.

The spectacle of John Paul preaching to more than 1 million people in this former Soviet republic and greeting a renegade Orthodox prelate has stiffened opposition in Russia, seat of the largest Orthodox flock, to a papal journey there.

Yet the warm welcome here for the Roman pontiff and the presence of admiring Orthodox believers at his Masses and liturgies left his Orthodox critics more isolated. The pope from neighboring Poland charmed audiences in fluent Ukrainian, reaching across the divide and drawing applause with appeals for ecumenical peace.

“We have been waiting a long time for him in Ukraine,” said Raisa Terletska, an elderly Orthodox Christian who beamed with joy as John Paul waved from his popemobile to an outdoor crowd at Mass this week in Kiev, the capital. “It is like seeing a saint.”

Other Orthodox saw him, instead, as a “forerunner of the Apocalypse,” in the words of one bishop, who blamed the pope for hailstorms that destroyed wheat crops in three Ukrainian provinces. The visit “will not bring any pacification to the [churches] in Ukraine but, on the contrary, will only complicate them,” said Patriarch Alexi II of Russia, the pope’s most powerful Orthodox critic.

Underlining his displeasure, Alexi spent all five days of the papal visit on his own counter-mission to neighboring Belarus. With that former Soviet republic’s president, Alexander G. Lukashenko, at his side, he exhorted its Orthodox majority to stand firm against a Catholic incursion.

The patriarch often speaks of the churches’ rivalry as a “religious war,” with Ukraine, cradle of the Orthodox religion, as the chief battleground.

It was here, in 988, that Prince Vladimir accepted Christianity for the Slavic precursors of the Russian state. It was here, in 1596, that breakaway Orthodox leaders declared loyalty to the Vatican and created the Greek Catholic Church. And it was here, in 1946, that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin banned Greek Catholicism, killing its leaders or driving them underground.

After the Soviet collapse a decade ago, feuds broke out, violently at times, as Greek Catholics began to reclaim churches that Stalin had handed to the state-sanctioned Orthodox Church. Orthodox leaders, defending the division between eastern and western Christian traditions, also denounced Catholic “proselytizing” in their “canonical space.”

Two Decades of Seeking to Break a Deadlock

A hallmark of John Paul’s 23-year papacy is his refusal to accept this division as permanent. In the last two years, the pope has visited three other countries with Orthodox majorities--Romania, Georgia and Greece--seeking to break a deadlock in two decades of talks between Catholics and Orthodox on how to heal their schism.

That split dates to 1054, when a French cardinal representing the pope walked into the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, now Istanbul, and excommunicated the city’s patriarch, who had forced some Latin churches to use the Greek language in liturgy.

To this day, Orthodox and Catholic churches have substantial theological differences--including whether to use unleavened bread in the Eucharist, whether to require that priests be celibate and how to interpret the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

John Paul scored a breakthrough in Greece last month as Orthodox bishops, after agreeing reluctantly to receive him, applauded his apology for Catholic wrongs in the sacking of Constantinople during the Crusades.

Ukraine was a far more sensitive visit because its main Orthodox church, which is subordinate to Alexi’s Russian Orthodox Church, pleaded with the pope not to come and refused to meet him when he did.

Treading cautiously, John Paul accepted kisses on both cheeks from Alexi’s excommunicated Orthodox rival in Ukraine, Metropolitan Filaret, at a government-sponsored inter-faith meeting Sunday, but did not meet privately with or voice support for the renegade prelate, who has set up his own Orthodox church.

Alexi’s church did not break off contact with the Vatican, as it had threatened to do if such an encounter took place. But his spokesman warned Wednesday that relations will be “spoiled seriously for a long time to come” if the Holy See “builds on its relations with [Filaret’s] schismatic group.”

More Pilgrimages to Former Soviet Republics

Even if relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church get no worse, however, it is hard to imagine them getting better.

“The pope’s meetings in Ukraine have sealed his fate as persona non grata in Moscow,” said Felix Corley of the Keston Institute in England, which monitors religious freedom in the former Soviet Union. “The pope must know this, but he evidently felt it was time to go pay tribute to Ukrainian Catholics. He was not going to let the Orthodox veto that trip any longer.”

For the same reason, John Paul plans pilgrimages to two other former Soviet republics, Kazakhstan and Armenia, in September. He also is weighing an invitation from Bulgaria, a predominantly Orthodox country that was once in the Soviet bloc. The visits are certain to irritate Russian Orthodox leaders, who speak of a papal plot to “encircle” their territory.

Despite the tensions, the leader of the 5-million-strong Greek Catholic Church here, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, pronounced the papal pilgrimage “quite successful” and renewed the Vatican’s call for Alexi to drop his resistance to a meeting with the pope.

Recalling that the Soviet Union’s demise also once seemed impossible, Husar said divine providence could bring about such a meeting. “The Lord has means at his disposal that we do not have,” he told reporters. Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said John Paul still prays for a pilgrimage to Russia.

For that to happen, John Paul could merely accept an invitation from Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and the country’s small Roman Catholic community.

The pope also wants an invitation from Alexi, but that would first require the rival churches to settle two questions: Who owns disputed church buildings in three Ukrainian dioceses? And which people in Eastern Europe’s Orthodox-majority countries--anyone, or merely those who are not baptized Orthodox--are fair game for Catholic conversion? Most of Ukraine’s 50 million people are baptized Orthodox.

Catholic officials say Orthodox foot-dragging has delayed the work of a joint commission to examine property disputes. They object to the broad Orthodox definition of any Catholic parish building as an instance of proselytizing but admit that their missionaries at times violate a 1987 accord against poaching from each other’s flocks.

“We are sometimes too quick with our opinions,” Husar said, predicting that the gap can be easily bridged. “When the problem is solved, we will laugh at ourselves and ask how can we have failed to see such a clear outcome.”

Russian analysts suggest that Alexi’s real reason for resisting the pope is a belief that the Vatican wants the Ukrainian Orthodox church free of his control--a shift that would end the patriarch’s preeminence as leader of the biggest Orthodox flock. Since the pope’s call here Saturday for mutual forgiveness and respect, however, Alexi’s hard line is wearing thin for many in Ukraine and Russia.

Writing Tuesday in the Moscow Times, Russian commentator Yevgenia Albats called John Paul “one of the great politicians of his age” while saying that the patriarch’s “message of intolerance and confrontation” is moving Russia away from the “civilized world.”

It remains to be seen whether those within the Russian Orthodox Church who are resistant to the Vatican will continue to prevail. One Russian Orthodox archpriest, Ioan Sviridov, ignored Alexi’s boycott and turned up on the altar Wednesday at John Paul’s farewell liturgy here. In Moscow, a radio station said its snap phone-in survey found that 76% of about 1,800 callers disagreed with the Russian church’s anti-papal stance.

Little Opposition From Ordinary Ukrainians

Citing polls that show just 5% of Ukrainians opposed the pope’s visit, the Kiev newspaper Den said this country had “voted for openness and tolerance in religious life, and against medieval insularity and peasant narrow-mindedness.”

Orthodox believers who came to hear the pope said they were not ashamed to do so.

“It’s the same God,” said Olga Sushko, a Russian-born member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, who went to a papal Mass in Kiev with her husband, Vladimir, a Roman Catholic.

“The need for unity is clearer to ordinary people than to the leaders,” Vladimir Sushko said. “There should be no barriers.”

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A Religion Divided

The split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches is one of the fundamental events in the history of Christianity.

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Roots of the split: As early as the 400s, differences over political and theological issues began to develop between western Christian churches, based in Rome, and eastern Christian churches, based in Constantinople (now Istanbul). This gave rise to misunderstandings and, finally, led to two widely separate ways of interpreting the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The eastern churches also resented Rome’s enforcement of clerical celibacy and the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist.

Schism of 1054: The conflict came to a head when Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople, and Pope Leo IX excommunicated each other. Orthodoxy eventually became the dominant religion in much of the former Soviet Union, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and parts of the former Yugoslav federation. In 1204, western Christians on the Fourth Crusade partially destroyed Constantinople and installed a patriarch submissive to the pope, fueling further bitterness.

The healing begins: The mutual hostility and isolation began to break down in the 1960s. In 1964, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople met for the first time, in Jerusalem. A joint declaration issued in 1965 “erased from the memory” of the churches the mutual excommunications of 1054. In 1967, the pope and patriarch exchanged visits in Rome and Istanbul.

The commission: In 1979, the two sides set up a joint commission to reestablish “full communion.” The commission met nine times between 1980 and 2000, but its work hit an impasse after 1989, when the end of the Cold War led to a revival of churches in Eastern Europe, creating tensions between Orthodox and Christian communities there.

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Sources: Times staff, World Book, Encyclopaedia Britannica