The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Galicia (1946–1968): Strategies of Survival and Resistance in the Underground
Speaker: Dr Kateryna Budz, BASEES Ukrainian Scholar at Risk
During the Second World War, Eastern Galicia, a part of Poland during the inter-war period, came under Soviet rule. In 1946, the Soviet regime officially abolished the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), the Eastern-rite Church subordinated to the Vatican, through its forced merger with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Under state pressure, most parish priests formally joined the ROC. In contrast, the Greek Catholic hierarchy as well as a part of the clergy refused to “reunite” with the ROC despite arrests and persecutions.
What motivated the latter to adopt a nonconformist stance? Was the opposition of the “non-reunited” Greek Catholics fuelled by political, nationalist, or religious sentiments? How did the members of the banned Church navigate Soviet daily life?
This talk focuses on the strategies of survival and resistance employed by the Ukrainian Greek Catholics who did not “reunite” with the ROC and went underground. On the one hand, the members of the clandestine community tried to adjust to the Soviet surroundings. On the other hand, they employed multiple strategies of resistance, ranging from legal forms of protest to outright confrontation with the representatives of the Soviet state.
The analysis of the clandestine Greek Catholics’ modes of dealing with the Soviet state reveals the complexity of their motives. Oscillating between accommodation and resistance towards the Soviet state, members of the underground Church were able to preserve their denominational identity in a hostile environment up to 1990, when the UGCC was finally legalised.
Speaker
Dr Kateryna Budz is currently an Ecclesiastical History Society Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom). Kateryna Budz holds a PhD in History from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine). She pursued her research at the New Europe College (Bucharest, Romania), University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada), Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale, Germany), and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Budz specialises in the history of the clandestine Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) in the Soviet Union. Her research interests also include Jewish-Christian relations during the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia and responses of the UGCC to the current Russo-Ukrainian war.
Her research has been supported by the Black Sea Link Fellowship, German Academic Exchange Service, Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine at the University of Toronto, Combe Trust Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, as well as the RHS, BASEES, EHS and GHS Scholars at Risk Programme.