Uniates survived communism and flourish again in Ukraine

FREEDOM of worship arrived in stages in the old Soviet Union and by the time President Gorbachev had instituted glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s, most churches had enjoyed a liberty far greater than they had known since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. There was, however, one major exception.

The Uniate Catholic Church based mainly in western Ukraine, Fin communion with Rome but using the Eastern liturgy, remained underground until President Yeltsin, President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and the Prime Minister of Belarus, Mr Stanislav Shushkevich, met in December 1991 to announce that the USSR had been dissolved.

Since then the Ukrainian Catholic churches have mushroomed, and the church now claims five million members and thousands of married priests. The Vatican allows Eastern-rite priests to marry, and Father Pyotr is one of them.

The rules are fairly strict. A priest cannot marry, but a married man can be ordained. Should a priest wish to become a bishop he must remain celibate, but the married priesthood is an important tradition in the Ukrainian branch of the Roman Catholic Church and is likely to remain so.

Father Pyotr, whose civil name is Henri Martin, is an Armenian of French descent who was ordained in Georgia and is attached to the Ukrainian diocese of Ivano Frankovsk. He and his wife, Svetlana Proutsakova, who comes from the Russian Orthodox tradition, met when they were students in Moscow 25 years ago. They have four children: Boris (20) works in Moscow; Olga-Marie (17) is a student in Luxembourg; and Denis (15) and Andrei (13) are at school in Moscow.

Father Pyotr says their marriage is similar to that of an ordinary couple except for his occupation. "It's nothing different. There are my religious duties but the children have to be got ready for school. Clothes have to be bought and a family has to be fed."

The married status has not, however, led to Father Pyotr adopting an ultra-liberal stance towards priestly celibacy. "I would advise those priests in the West who are calling for an end to the regulations on celibacy to think hard about it. Becoming a priest is to carry a cross. To be a priest and to be married is to bear two crosses.

At this remark, Svetlana smiled her little smile which seemed to say: "Wait till you get home", but her views on celibacy in the West turned out to be just as conservative as her husband's.

"If a priest takes a vow to be celibate, he should keep his word. My husband has warned priests about the responsibilities they would take on if they became married. I would like to warn women that if a man breaks his word to the church, he will break his word "to a woman, too. He will leave the church and then break his word to his wife."

Father Pyotr went even further and put himself in the second division of priesthood: "Celibacy is a privilege. To be celibate is a special destiny, a more elevated way in which a priest can serve God directly. It is by no means a penalty, it is not a punishment. While I do not think it should be obligatory, priests in the West should realise that in the end celibacy is a treasure of the church."

The conservatism of both Father Pyotr and Svetlana is not all that surprising. Most churches suffered harassment, had their property seized and were subject to anti-religious propaganda. The restrictions hardened and softened with the times.

Stalin, a former seminarian of the Georgian Orthodox Church, was generally tough but when he needed help in the second World War he granted some freedom to the Russian Orthodox Church in return for its support. The conflict then became the Great Patriotic War, a war in which people fought in defence of Holy Russia as much as for the survival of the Soviet system.

Under Nikita Khrushchev restrictions eased further only to be hardened again in the Brezhnev era and eased under Gorbachev. All this applied mainly to the various branches of Orthodoxy, to the large Islamic of the population, the Armenian National Christian, "Church, the Evangelical Lutherans mainly centred in Estonia and Latvia, the Buddhists in the Far East, the various Protestant denominations led by the Baptists in Russia, and to the Roman Catholics of the Latin rite who were most numerous in Lithuania.

All the while the Ukrainian Eastern Rite Roman Catholics remained under a total ban and operated clandestinely right up to the Soviet Union's demise in 1991.

The church had been associated with Ukrainian nationalism and more specifically with those Ukrainian nationalists who had sided with Hitler in the war. It was in Soviet eyes a treasonous organisation and was treated accordingly.

Things are now very different, indeed. The Uniates flourish in western Ukraine and particularly in the lovely old former Polish city of Lvov where, with the arrival of well-trained and zealous Ukrainian-Catholic clergy from Canada in particular, the church has regained its pre-eminent role in the region.

The clandestine nature of the church, however, left it untouched by the liberal movements which sprang up elsewhere in the world particularly after Vatican II. Even in Lithuania, where the church enjoyed greater freedom, Pope John Paul II is regarded by many clergy as a "dangerous liberal".

Today Father Pyotr is still not permitted to run a Uniate parish in Moscow, as such a situation could be construed by the Russian Orthodox Church as "proselytising" in a region in which it is by far the largest Christian denomination.

Instead he devotes himself to a small religious publishing business that unites Christian businessmen of all denominations, which he regards as an opportunity for the church to maintain a social and political independence of which it was hitherto deprived.

He celebrates Mass, of course, sometimes in the Eastern rite but also quite frequently in the Latin rite, which he and other priests of the Ukrainian Roman Catholic Church are permitted to do despite their marital status.