Given the rubbish about Ukraine spewed out by Russian propaganda trolls and regurgitated by foolish or ideologically besotted Americans, this year’s annual Summer Reading List will focus on serious books that explain the background, including the religious dimension, of a conflict that will shape Europe’s future — and ours.
Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, by Serhii Plokhy, tracks the imperialist chromosomes in Russia’s national genome over hundreds of years. Plokhy understands the crucial role that a distorted history of eastern Slavic Christianity — vigorously promoted by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church — plays in the “Russian world” ideology that underwrites Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. The Harvard scholar’s 2015 book, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, is also useful in unpacking an unusually complicated story.
My first tutor in matters Ukrainian was the late Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, the premier historian of the underground Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine during Stalinist times. Bociurkiw’s study, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939-1950, uses materials from once-classified Soviet archives to trace the vicious communist persecution of Ukrainian Greek Catholics, and the acquiescence in that persecution by Russian Orthodox leaders who were in fact agents of Soviet state power. It is little short of miraculous that today’s vibrant Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church survived the campaign of disintegration Bociurkiw describes. It not only survived, however, but prevailed — a compelling, inspiring example of the hand of God at work through resilience born of faith.
Imperial Russian and Russian Orthodox antipathies towards Ukraine and Ukrainian Greek Catholics are based in no small part on the 1596 Union of Brest, which restored full communion between the Bishop of Rome and certain ecclesiastical jurisdictions in eastern Europe. My friend Borys Gudziak, the priest-scholar-educator who is now the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archeparch of Philadelphia, wrote the definitive study of that consequential event: Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest. At dinner one night, I had the pleasure of presenting an autographed copy of the book to John Paul II, and I’m confident that that voracious reader absorbed then-Father Gudziak’s analysis before the papal pilgrimage to Ukraine in 2001, which helped heal many of the wounds Poles and Ukrainians had inflicted on each other. Crisis and Reform is not for popes and scholarly historians only, however; it’s essential reading for anyone wanting to understand one important root of what’s afoot in eastern Christianity today.
Since the Russian war on Ukraine began on February 24, the world has been deeply impressed by the courageous leadership of the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk. Major-Archbishop Shevchuk’s unshakeable Christian faith, pastoral acumen and mature patriotism reflect qualities evident in several of his predecessors. One of them — the model for the “pope from the steppes” in The Shoes of the Fisherman (the novel, please, not the third-rate movie) — was sketched by historian Jaroslav Pelikan inConfessor Between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. After surviving 18 years in various Gulag camps, Slipyj was expelled from the USSR and exiled to Rome. There, he nurtured the beginnings of the Ukrainian Catholic University that his former student, Borys Gudziak, would start to build within a decade of the cardinal’s death in 1984.
Cardinal Slipyj’s predecessor, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, led the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine for over 40 years and played a key role in the development of Ukrainian cultural and national consciousness amidst two world wars, Stalin’s Ukrainian terror famine (the Holodomor) and relentless Soviet efforts to break the spirit of Ukrainians.Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, edited by Paul Robert Magocsi, explores the many facets of the life of one of 20th-century Catholicism’s most striking figures: a man of broad culture, theological originality and ecumenical sensibility who lived the social doctrine of the Catholic Church during some of the grimmest of modern times, chillingly described by Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. In doing so, Venerable Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, Metropolitan Archbishop of L’viv and Halych, laid the foundations on which Ukrainian Greek Catholicism has been built since it emerged from the underground in 1989: a vibrant, publicly engaged Church that helped shape the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14, and that is now supporting the Ukrainian people in their determination to build a humane society in contrast to Putin’s imperial kleptocracy and its murderous ways.
I doubt that Mr. Tucker Carlson will read any of these books. But he should.
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“Ukrainian people in their determination to build a humane society in contrast to Putin’s imperial kleptocracy and its murderous ways.”
George needs to read CWR.
The first article presented today explains precisely what the “humane society” will look like that Zelensky and his mob of posers intend to build. It states, “St. Augustine calls pride the libido dominandi — the lust for domination — and he describes this as a spiritual disposition which is fundamentally disordering.”
THAT is the “humane society” George fantasizes about while he describes those who oppose his viewpoint as “foolish or ideologically besotted Americans.”
Someone has been duped, all right.
Another perspective on the matter:
https://freewestmedia.com/2022/05/14/french-former-marine-returns-from-ukraine-shocked/
Mr. Weigel strains credulity fighting against what he seems to believe is a vast army of Russian sympathizers rooting for Lord Putin.
His “high-horsed” mockery of Tucker Carlson comes off as “Mitt-Romney-ish,” and exposes the weakness of his own reason, relying on mockery, perhaps because he lacks confidence in the persuasiveness of his own position on the war in Ukraine (whatever the heck his position might be).
For myself, I will continue listening to Tucker Carlson, and weighing his viewpoints, and not listening to presumptuous, 2nd-rate dismissals dished out by Mr. Wiegel (who, I recall, promotes the McCarrick policy of the Eucharist…meaning NOT enforcing Canan 915, and not supporting Archbishop Cordelione).
And i might chrck into the books W recommends…
While Ukrainians (and Poles) do not want to be ruled by Russia, the conflict is none of the business of the US. The US has its own border to defend, which today it refuses. I particularly dislike the corruption the US, via the CIA and the Bidens, has fostered in Ukraine and paved the way for Putin to attack.
It is a pity you insulted only one country in your opening paragraph: ” regurgitated by foolish or ideologically besotted Americans”, as if only Americans have foolish or ideologically besotted citizens. Remember, Catholic World Report is read all over the world. Clearly, there are foolish or ideologically besotted people all over the world, and though you may not realize it, you reveal your own ideological besottedness with such a sentence.
What has Tucker Carlson to do with George Weigel?
Name-dropping favored famous friends while blackballing baneful bêtes noires? Nursery rhymes and child’s play employ similar tactics. Why does a man?
In the nursery rhyme, Georgie Porridgie supplanted unwelcome advances upon society’s weaker members, only to run from tough seekers of justice (boys).
Will a run from an egregious ego never begin? This OP begins and ends with one letter – – “I” – – written with a flourish. Who gives a whit what Weigel’s ego wants?
I have my own differences with George Weigel, but I’m glad to see him stir the pot at CWR to the point where the commentariat loses basic spell-check practices. Free West Media, btw, is an entertainment venue, not a reputable source of news and information.
I find it truly fascinating that so many among the anti-Ukrainian commenters here (and elsewhere) seem to have absolutely no interest in what the Catholic Church leaders in Ukraine think and preach about the situation there. It seems rather condescending to me especially in light of the amazing accomplishments these faithful bishops, clergy, religious and lay people have achieved for their Catholic faith since the fall of Communism. But I suspect such commenters
are completely unaware, and perhaps do not care. Why listen to our Church in Ukraine when outsiders know so much better?
For additional balance, Mr. Weigel might do an internet search of Ukraine/corruption. Even if you consider Putin to be Goliath, Zelensky is not St. David. With all the Ukrainian propaganda about how they were being so successful against Russia, we now read that Zelensky says that they are loosing 100 soldiers a day, Russia has control of 20% of their territory, and our government has just said that we were overstating Ukrainian success.
In his continuing series on CWR, Mr. Weigel seems to be calling for unconditional surrender, and complete pullout of Russia from all Ukrainian territory. Does anyone realistically think that this will happen? The Ukrainians should fight to the last man?
Is it not time for negations? they always require give and take.
I suppose we could do a search on GOP/corruption. But we might blow up the internet. That a politician or nation is imperfect isn’t news. That doesn’t stop us from rooting against an evil, corrupt, and perhaps fortunately an incompetent aggressor. The penalty for being imperfect is not that a foreign power gets to bomb schools, churches, hospitals, and homes of the people who elected him.
I do hope Putin apologists dodge being excommunicated by their bishop. Maybe an encounter with the Lord of Truth and Life will inspire a sincere contrition and conversion away from human ideology to Christianity.
“Given the rubbish about Ukraine spewed out by Russian propaganda trolls and regurgitated by foolish or ideologically besotted Americans…”
So what’s the antidote to the rubbish about the Ukraine spewed out by Ukrainian, NATO, and what can safely be called the Western New World Order Alliance propaganda trolls, who clearly are better equipped to do so?