Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv, courtesy of Wikipedia, by Tim Adams, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Politico Magazine, last October, reported:
The war has made the Orthodox church a force for national unity. Where will it go from here?
KYIV, Ukraine — One Friday afternoon in late July, on the bank of Kyiv’s Lake Jordan, more than 400 Ukrainians gathered to celebrate their national christening. Cupcakes, pies, and cookies with blue-and-gold frosting, knitted and stitched handicrafts and pictures of national poet Taras Shevchenko filled kiosks that also sold boozy fruit juice and humongous slabs of brisket. Uniformed soldiers from the 244th battalion of the Ukrainian army chatted with wives, girlfriends, civilians and vendors intending to donate their earnings to that unit. High school kids horsed around with what looked to be an empty rocket case near moms presiding over screeching toddlers in a sandbox.
An hour into the eclectic festivities everyone hushed, and Father Georgi Kovalenko took over and chanted prayers. Another priest, Father Cyril Hovorun, gave a sermon and spritzed the gathering from the waters with which — 1,035 years ago to the day, according to lore — the baptism of Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv began the incorporation of present-day Ukraine, Russia and Belarus into Christendom.
…
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine — to which Fathers Hovorun and Kovalenko belong — is now Ukraine’s most important spiritual institution. Long governed by the Russian Orthodox Church, it was granted independence (called “autocephaly”) and equality with Moscow in 2019 by the patriarch of Constantinople — who is first among the equal heads of the Orthodox churches. Orthodox Ukrainian priests have played a patriotic role in their nation’s post-Soviet history; they led prayers during the Maidan uprising in 2014 and now supply more chaplains to Ukraine’s military than any other church’s clergy. The OCU’s patriotism is coupled with its conservatism — it opposes civil unions and the since-ratified Istanbul Convention against Domestic Violence (for using the word “gender,” which offended church teaching about the sexes). For all its centrality to Ukraine’s spiritual life, however, the OCU is an ecumenical church — it does not lead a state religion, and frequently works with Ukraine’s many (and quite traditional) Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews.
0 Comments