The Global Church Era · 1946-1989 · Ukraine
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Underground
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About This Movement
In March 1946 a synod was convened at Lviv that dissolved the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church. Every one of the church's bishops had already been arrested, and none took part. What followed was forty-three years as the largest banned church in the world: priests ordained in secret, liturgies in apartments and forests, bishops in the Gulag. Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky's pastoral letters — among them one from 1942 headed 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' — went on being read through the underground years, and his successor Josyf Slipyj spent from 1945 to 1963 in the camps before his release. From 1984 an initiative group circulated a Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Ukraine in samizdat. In 1989 the church was legalized, and it came out with its hierarchy, its parishes and its people intact — which is not what the state had been counting on.
Sources
- The liquidation record: the 1946 Lviv 'Sobor' records (staged synod, all bishops already arrested); NKVD/KGB files opened post-1991 (primary) — These records come from the persecuting state's own archives.
- The confessors' own record: Sheptytsky's pastoral letters (incl. 'Thou Shalt Not Kill', 1942); Slipyj's Gulag letters and memoirs (1945-63); clandestine ordination and underground-liturgy records via survivor testimony (primary)
- Samizdat: the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Ukraine (1984-, Terelya's initiative group) (primary) — The underground church's own self-documentation from the late Soviet period.
- Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950) (CIUS, 1996); Keston archive Ukraine files (secondary) — Bociurkiw is the standard scholarly work; the Keston archive is advocacy-positioned.
- The 1989 legalization and the records of the church's emergence intact in 1989-91; CHC vol. 9; Chadwick (reference) — Marks the end of the underground period; the church itself continued afterward.