On the border line

“Muslim Istanbul is closer to European integration than Orthodox Kiev. It’s not an irrelevant paradox that can be explained with the fact that the bordering line separating Western and Eastern Christianity does in fact split Europe in two”. Indeed, “a certain kind of Orthodoxy is more distant from Europe than a certain kind of Islam”. The claim was upheld by Oxana Pachlovska, History Professor at “La Sapienza” University in Rome and member of Ukraine’s national Academy of Sciences. In the address she delivered a few days ago at a round table promoted by the Luigi Sturzo Institute in Rome in conjunction with the “Associazione Desiderio Pirovano”, the historian explained: “In these two worlds Ukraine is viewed as a caesura: divided between Catholicism and Orthodoxy – that in turn is itself marked by a three-fold inner division”. In Kiev, the roots. Professor Pachlovska pointed out that Kiev “represents the origins of Russian religiosity. Nonetheless, Russia has always tried to repress its religious and cultural identity that is open to the West”. In the historian’s words, the Orthodox world “is currently marked by visible division. While Russia is increasingly hostile to the West and its former satellite Countries, and Belarus is pervicaciously Sovietic, despite the many difficulties, Ukraine prefers the Euro-Atlantic path in opposition with Moscow. Bulgaria, homeland of Slav Orthodoxy, unexpectedly draws away from the Orthodox monolith without too much suffering and the once ultra-nationalistic Serbia is today on the threshold of EU adhesion”. Ukrainian identity. “Russian Orthodoxy and Ukrainian Orthodoxy – Pachlovska claimed – are not a single entity. In fact, they represent historical antagonism. The Byzantine Altar-throne model has been the basis on which the Russian state has reposed its foundation – that it is currently seeking to rebuild – since the times of Ivan the Terrible”. This profound cultural matrix has “always forced the Church to be submitted to political powers”. But Ukraine is a different story. “Having been forced to suffer external power – the historian pointed out – Ukrainian society developed a religiosity that opposes power and views the Church as the pillar of the people’s authentic resistance. The Western world doesn’t sufficiently value this aspect that instead is of primary importance”. Before “the Ukrainian Church was absorbed by Moscow at the end of the 17th century, the local society had established close relations with Polish culture, having belonged to the Lithuanian-Polish Republic for a long time”. This is why “the only Orthodox culture open to Latin culture and to European and Western thought developed in the Country”. Even though since 1698 “Ukraine was compelled to withstand a strong “Russification”, the profound roots of its national identity have remained unaltered”. Something new. For the scholar, “the Church’s Sovietization has had devastating consequences on the moral, religious and political planes. The political use of the Church at the times of the Empire did in fact enable Soviet manipulation of the Church by the regime, with the common denominator of a population subjected to rule” giving rise to “a society that shuns political participation”. However, she concluded, “there’s something new in the air; after the visit of Patriarch Bartholomew in Kiev past July, we are working towards the union of Ukrainian Orthodox Churches under the aegis of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, their historical seat. While in November, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, the Church acknowledged the massacre as the genocide of the Ukrainian people; an acknowledgment deemed impossible until recently”. A history of martyrdom. Retracing the events experienced by the Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin’s rule, historian Roberto Morozzo Della Rocca described it as “a history marked by suffering and martyrdom”. “Church-State separation recognised in the 1920s of the past century – he explained – did in fact ‘institutionalize’ a form of oppression of the State against the Church, that was stripped of its legal personality”. Professor Morozzo recalled “the waves” of persecutions against the Church: “In the years 1920-1930, the Orthodox, the Catholics of Eastern rite, the Armenians and Muslim Muftis were deported to the first gulag for prelates” that “became the model of Stalin’s successive gulags”. In the years 1929-32 (the year of the strife against the kulaki) and in 1937-39 (the years of the “major purges”) “the Church dignitaries had disappeared throughout almost the entire country”. “Of the 272 bishops present in the Country since 1914 – the historian declared – at the end of the 1930s only 4 were left; from 5,100 the number of priests dropped to several hundreds”. Of the thousand monasteries not one was left, while the churches – 54thousand in 1914 – only amounted to one-hundred in the 1930s. Despite this “extirpation plan”, a survey carried out in 1937 that was kept secret until 1990, “revealed that half of the population described themselves as religious”.