Miscellany as We Go to War

Does it not feel like an old, European war? Who knows what has happened in the two days between when I write this and when you read it. But I just think of all those TV shows and movies giving the lie to our peace witness. The flame draws us, or me, at least, but this is beyond entertainment.

“Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to the people of Russia to avoid war. He gave the speech in Russian, his own primary language, and, reminding Russians of their shared border and history, told them to ‘listen to the voice of reason’: Ukrainians want peace.” That’s how Heather Cox Richardson began her post for Wednesday this week. Zelenskly is Jewish. He believes in reason.

Thursday online Brendan Walsh introduced the “Leader” or editorial in The Tablet by saying:

we look at the religious beliefs used to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine – the idea of a mystical union of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in the one land of Holy Rus. Vladimir Putin seems to believe in this as fervently as the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. How far the Russian people, the military, the bureaucrats and the kleptocrats who surround Putin share his destiny to restore a new heaven on a new earth is unclear. The West’s response must drive a wedge between the president and his associates by raising the cost of their support for his wayward mystical ambitions until it is too much to bear. 

I am distressed, thinking about Putin as a wayward mystic, when all I can remember is Oleh Gelemey, my high school classmate in Passaic, New Jersey, standing straight up in freshman history saying to Sister Theodora, “I am not Russian. I am Ukrainian!” Those mystical beliefs go deep, and have a religious fault line: Ukrainians cling to their Catholic faith, which we called “uniate” growing up. It defined their identity, their crosses, their church forms, their politics, and our politics, too. Russia was the Soviet Union, and I wonder now how much we blamed “Godless Communism” on some vague failure by the Orthodox Church. Of course, the retaliatory accusation could be Putin’s identification of Ukrainian Catholics with Nazis. And there are far fewer Jews than at the start of the last big war in Europe. Wars have consequences.

Christopher White in NCR bravely summarizes Pope Francis’s two minds as Putin’s war approaches. “Desperately” praying for peace yet “eagerly seeking to continue [his] détente with the Russian Orthodox Church, from which [Rome] has been split since the Great Schism of 1054.” About enough time to reconcile, don’t you think? On the plane from Greece this fall, Francis discussed plans for a follow-up meeting with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. When they met in Cuba in 2016 they “declared ‘we are brothers.’” Was there no way for them to prevent this war?

What powers do popes or patriarchs have? Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, head of the Catholic Church in Ukraine, skipped a meeting of European bishops in Florence because of the threat of invasion. He sent them a message: “Ukraine was defending European values ‘at the cost of the blood of its children,’” and he predicted a “death camp.” The CNS author oddly inserts that those who start wars lose them, and then quotes Archbishop Shevchuk’s message to his own people: “Today we solemnly proclaim: ‘Our soul and body we offer for our freedom!’”

Reminds me of Walsh, again: “But in another reality, populated by ideas familiar enough in Russia, [Putin’s ] determination to resist its enemies even to the death is not mad or irrational but necessary, and dictated by Providence.” Religious language resonates on both sides.

The Greek Catholics I met in Passaic inserted new dimensions in my religious consciousness. Irene Yacykewycz, another Ukrainian classmate, was missing some fingers, lost in her family’s “escape,” details never shared with me. We were in the gym when she told me that her father was a priest. I wonder if he had just said the mass; it would be like me to notice the same name, but the memory is vague. Certainly l learned from her that there were other ways of being Catholic.

As in so many old industrial cities, Catholic churches were clustered around Pope Pius XII High School. Next door was the Slovak church, St. Mary’s; going to daily masses there, I learned the response to the “Hail Mary” from the old women. Hungarian St. Stephen’s was on the “Riveria,” one of our priests used to say: the Passaic River. The Ukranians were at one St. Nicholas, the Irish at the other. Holy Trinity was German; what was Holy Rosary? There were more. Once I went to the installation of a Bishop at the Reuthenian Cathedral a couple of blocks from school, invited by a friend. I loved the diversity, and of course, the “fruit basket upset” was already taking place; not everyone went to church or school where they were supposed to be.

The Ukranians are fierce. White details a blistering conversation he had in Rome with Metropolitan-Archbishop Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, head of the Ukrainian Catholics in this country. “The Russian Orthodox Church is formulating colonial policy for Russian society,” he said, showing an awareness of current American academic conversational style. “Pope Francis has said many times that whenever Christians get caught up in power and money, we betray our vocations. When we are behind invasion and war, it’s scandalous.” Perhaps he has observed the American Bishops to understand so well the problems of power and money in church politics.

So let us pray. My radio reports today that Catholic and Orthodox parishioners in Philadelphia have been praying for peace together in these last few weeks. Ashley McKinless talks with her colleague James Martin, SJ, at America. She’s executive editor, and they bat around whether prayer works, even on Twitter, for a while, but finally Martin shares his prayer for Ukraine: “Peace, peace, peace. And let’s be blunt: We pray that Vladimir Putin’s heart be moved so that he could see what immense suffering he is causing. He is Christian, apparently. I pray that he understands that Jesus Christ desires peace.”