He led nations out of communist bondage

I first learnt in my youth of Juliusz Słowacki’s prophecy that a Slavic Pope would “lead the peoples out of shadow into the radiance where God dwells”, but I received it as a beautiful, almost unbelievable dream. Yet when, in October 1978, news reached the Perm-36 political prison camp in Kuchino in the Urals, where I was then serving my sentence, that Karol Wojtyła, the Cardinal of Kraków, had been elected Pope, my elation knew no bounds. Nor was it mine alone: that day, all the prisoners of the Brezhnev regime were seized by an extraordinary enthusiasm. It became clear that a man who had come to know the crimes of communism through his own fate and that of his people would inevitably recognise his mission to resist that regime in spirit. And so we, the political prisoners of those days, repeated with fervour: “This is the end of communism!” Saint John Paul II became a white light of hope for us even then.

We were therefore not surprised when, in response to the fiery appeal of this holy Pope - “Do not be afraid!” - the flame of Poland’s Solidarity was kindled, and the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe lit their torches from its fire. The energy of this relay of freedom eventually reached Ukraine as well. But first I want to tell of Saint John Paul II’s invisible “visit” to those Soviet labour camps.

On the eve of Easter in 1982, according to the Julian calendar, a group of us prisoners in the Perm-36 camp at Kuchino were warned that if we gathered to pray, we would be punished. Well, for a Christian, punishment for prayer is no cause for fear; we therefore ignored the ban, gathered on Sunday morning and said our prayers. We did not, however, have time to share our festive food. The guards descended upon us and, for organising a common Easter prayer, threw us into solitary confinement. This happened at the very time when Soviet-backed “Christian peace marches” were becoming popular in Western Europe and their participants looked with considerable favour upon their supposed “protector and peacemaker” - namely, the USSR. Thus, in the punishment cell, there ripened in us the desire to tell the Christians of the world that this same “peacemaker”, in his own home, had punished us solely for praying. The decision to address our letter to this Pope, who had so recently been elected, was unanimous. By secret channels we managed to send it to the Vatican, where the Pope celebrated Mass, recalling by name every one of its signatories. In this way, Saint John Paul II gave life to Christ’s words: “I was in prison and you came to me” (Mt 25:36). By coming to us, this holy Pope gave us an extraordinary spiritual impulse to break free at last from the communist house of bondage.

Overcoming the Legacy of Bondage

In the case of Pope John Paul II, the commandment of Christ just quoted carried another meaning as well: he was able to discern the traces and symbols of the enslavement of Ukrainian Christians, especially Ukrainian Greek Catholics, and he resolved to erase them. It was during his pontificate that the Vatican recognised and honoured the martyrdom of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and its distinct ecclesial character. Pope John Paul II officially declared illegitimate the pseudo-synod of Lviv in 1946, which had outlawed the UGCC; he personally paid tribute to the confessor of the faith, Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, who had endured eighteen years in the Gulag; and he recognised the UGCC as a local Church with a self-governing status, expressed, among other things, in the convocation of the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops of the UGCC in 1980. Finally, after successful talks with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, the Pope opened the door through which the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church could emerge from the underground and regain legal recognition. The Kremlin’s adversaries of the Vatican never forgave Gorbachev for this act. For the breath of religious freedom that the Pope allowed through that doorway began strikingly to transform the lands under communist rule - above all, Ukraine.

Yet even before this, Pope John Paul II had taken an unprecedented step, one that openly contradicted the established rules of the Ostpolitik of the time. I remember how Ukrainians suffered when, in 1988, the millennium of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’-Ukraine was officially celebrated in Moscow. For Ukrainians, this was both an outrageous paradox and a profound national humiliation, since at the time of the Baptism, primordial marshes stretched over the place where Moscow would one day stand. Saint John Paul II, however, knew history well and did not succumb to the Kremlin’s imperial deceit: at the Vatican that year, the jubilee was celebrated with Kyiv firmly at its centre, as a feast of the Ukrainian people.

It is important to emphasise that there was as yet no independent Ukrainian state, while in Poland the communist regime was only living out its final days. Yet there was a clear understanding that national liberation was directly bound up with spiritual liberation. Thus, both at the jubilee celebrations in Rome in 1988 with the Pope’s participation, and later at Częstochowa, the Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic bishops together invoked the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of Freedom - upon our oppressed peoples. And, as would soon become evident, their prayer was answered.

The Courage to Overcome Resistance and Defend What Is Just

The story of Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Ukraine in 2001 offers an exceptionally vivid illustration of his ability to overcome the resistance of outworn structures. Many in Ukraine received the first reports of his possible arrival as pure fantasy. Because of the “cassette scandal” - that is, the suspicion that the then President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, was connected with the murder of the prominent journalist Georgiy Gongadze - Ukraine had been placed beyond the margins of world politics. It is enough to recall that even the alphabets used in international seating protocols were altered so that the mighty of this world would not have to sit next to the Ukrainian president. The only hand the world extended to Ukraine at that time was the hand of this great Pope, and Ukraine’s political class, as well as Ukrainian society at large, deeply appreciated this gesture of inestimable support. It was then that Russian jealousy also made itself heard. Moscow regarded Ukraine as its own missionary territory, and the Kremlin therefore saw a papal pilgrimage undertaken without Moscow’s consent as brazen proselytism. It is hardly surprising that categorical protests against the Pope rang out from Moscow. More than that, the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, then based in Kyiv, ungraciously advised the Pope not to come to Ukraine. From the papal Curia and, more broadly, from the entire Catholic world came warnings against the “unwise provocation of Moscow”. In other words, every stereotype of Vatican Ostpolitik and geopolitical Realpolitik spoke at that moment at full volume. One had to be a man of extraordinary courage to move against this critical “Gulf Stream”.

And so, when the Pope’s aircraft was already on its way to Ukraine, two opposing prayers rose to God. One was offered by nuns in Kyiv belonging to the aforementioned Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, imploring that “the plane carrying the Pope not reach Kyiv”. The other - still more fervent - was the prayer of Greek and Roman Catholics and, with them, simply of Ukrainians of goodwill: that the first prayer might have no power...

Many in Russia expected the figure of a “frail old man” to repel Ukrainians. Yet on the very first day of the visit, the people of Kyiv - including many Orthodox Christians and non-believers - were moved that, despite all his infirmities, this “old Pope” had nevertheless come to them. What was supposedly meant to drive Ukrainians away instead drew them near. Leonid Kuchma was right after all when he entitled his book Ukraine Is Not Russia!

Through his 2001 pilgrimage to Ukraine, the Pope therefore gave us an important lesson: he came not to quarrel with Russia, but to raise up the significance of the Kyivan Christian tradition in its own right. It was honoured not in defiance of Moscow, but for its own sake - for the sake of Kyivan piety itself. There was, in truth, nothing surprising in this, for to Saint John Paul II the light of the Slavic East did indeed shine from the hills of Kyiv: “In a certain sense, Kyiv itself played the role of a ‘precursor of the Lord’ among the many peoples who would receive the proclamation of salvation from here”.

The papal pilgrimage to Ukraine also gave him the opportunity to repeat on this soil his famous words: “Here the Church breathes with the two lungs of the Eastern and Western traditions”, and to call Ukraine an “ecclesial workshop” in which unity in diversity and a “legitimate pluralism, guaranteed by the Successor of Peter” would be built. During the pilgrimage to Ukraine, Saint John Paul II beatified the first group of twenty-seven new martyrs of the UGCC and thus offered a model for a new theological interpretation of the ecumenical significance of martyrdom: “Together with them [the Greek Catholic new martyrs], Christians of other confessions were also persecuted and killed on account of Christ. Their joint martyrdom is a pressing call for reconciliation and unity. This is the ecumenism of the martyrs and witnesses to faith, which indicates the path of unity to the Christians of the twenty-first century.”

The only cloud in the bright sky of that pilgrimage was the disappointment of the faithful of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who had hoped that the Pope would recognise their Church as a patriarchate. This did not happen. At the same time, however, the Pope officially acknowledged that there were no longer any canonical or historical obstacles to such recognition. The statement offered consolation, for these papal words could no longer be erased from the Church’s memory. The day will yet come when one of the future Roman Pontiffs reads the “signs of the times” with favour and recognises that Ukrainian Christians are worthy of seeing their Church raised to patriarchal status. Pope John Paul II must therefore be given his due: unlike many world politicians, he developed a genuinely Ukrainian policy, independent in its own right and not derivative of a Russian policy. Thus, when speaking from Ukraine, the Pope did not publicly engage in polemics with Moscow; he bore witness instead to the historical significance of the Kyivan Christian tradition.

To Be an Advocate of Reconciliation

By the time Saint John Paul II arrived in Kyiv, Ukrainians already knew that he had become the first Pope to bow his head in repentance, in the name of the Catholic Church, before all those who carried in their hearts the memory of historical wrongs inflicted by Catholics, and to ask their forgiveness. There was therefore nothing surprising in the fact that, after landing at Boryspil Airport, he proclaimed a similar formula of repentance: “As we ask forgiveness for the errors committed in both the distant and recent past, let us in turn offer forgiveness for the wrongs endured.” At the time, one could hear some non-Catholic Christians - especially those from Moscow - making malicious remarks such as: “We told you the Catholics were to blame. Now the Pope himself has admitted it.” Yet from the moral height of Saint John Paul II’s act of repentance, such statements appeared spiritually impoverished and, in the Gospel sense, without credibility. Saint John Paul II’s formula of repentance became a model for the entire Catholic Church and therefore a matrix for reconciliation between the Ukrainian and Polish peoples. The words he spoke at the liturgy in Lviv in 2001 sounded like a true apotheosis of fraternity, in which the Christian and the national were fused into one: “It is time to leave behind the sorrowful past. The Christians of the two nations must walk together in the name of the one Christ, towards the one Father, guided by the same Holy Spirit, the source and principle of unity. May pardon given and received spread like a healing balm in every heart. May the purification of historical memories lead everyone to work for the triumph of what unites over what divides, in order to build together a future of mutual respect, fraternal cooperation and true solidarity.”

It is hardly surprising, then, that during that same memorable liturgy in Lviv, attended by more than a million faithful, the then head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, uttered these confessional words, binding upon all Greek Catholics: “The history of our Church in the past century also knew dark and spiritually tragic moments. They consisted in the fact that some sons and daughters of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, to our profound sorrow, consciously and voluntarily wronged their neighbours, whether from their own people or from other nations. For all of them, in your presence, Holy Father, and in the name of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, I wish to ask forgiveness from the Lord, the Creator and Father of us all, and also from those whom we, the sons and daughters of this Church, have wronged in any way. So that the terrible past may not weigh upon us and poison our lives, we gladly forgive those who, in any way, have also wronged us”.

This exchange of exalted examples of Christian spirituality exerted an extraordinary influence upon the faithful. It made everyone better - or at least moved them to become so. The Pope’s lofty words became cornerstones in the modern history of Polish-Ukrainian understanding, whose foundations had already been laid by Jerzy Giedroyc in his Paris-based Kultura. They raised us above barriers and taught us that the struggle between competing historiographies will have no end unless we succeed in Christianising our historical imagination. All of us - Ukrainians and Poles alike - must understand that the formula “let them first... (acknowledge, apologise, and so forth), and only then shall we...” is in fact confrontational and leads to ruin. It reveals the weakness of our faith, for Christians must vie with one another in love, not in national ambition.

Seeing into the Future

Once, some Polish interlocutors asked me whether Ukrainians had heard Saint John Paul II’s appeal, “Do not be afraid!”, and what influence his pontificate had exerted upon Ukraine. Well, when Poland heard that appeal, Ukraine was still shackled in communist chains. Yet the Pope’s pilgrimage in 2001 already had a transformative effect on Ukrainian history. While still in Kyiv, Saint John Paul II left us a prophecy hewn from the ancient prediction of the holy Apostle Andrew concerning the radiance of God’s glory above the hills of Kyiv. The Pope said: “The Apostle’s vision does not concern only your past; its light shines also on the future of your country. With the eyes of my heart, in fact, I seem to see a new radiance spreading over this blessed land...”

That prophetic “vision with the eyes of the heart” began to come true almost at once, when two Ukrainian festivals of the spirit erupted in the country’s capital: the Orange Revolution of 2004 and, later, the Revolution of Dignity of 2013-2014. One may say that the words of Saint John Paul II were also present in these spiritual risings of Ukraine, for on those Maidans there sprang up the seeds of Christian truth that he had sown so generously during his life. In the Ukrainians’ surging desire to affirm their own dignity, one could recognise the fruits of his luminous pastoral ministry. An interesting detail: for several weeks after the Pope’s 2001 pilgrimage, the streets of Lviv remained spotless, drivers courteously made way for one another, and pedestrians were allowed to cross with unfailing kindness...

Certain conclusions from Saint John Paul II’s teaching can also be drawn today, amid Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. He was an inspired architect of that Europe to which Ukrainians wished with all their strength to return. As follows from his message to the European Jewish-Christian Congress in Paris on 28-29 January 2002, he sought “to build the common European home together, united in justice, peace, equity and solidarity”. He therefore encouraged his listeners with these inspired words: “It is our task to pass on to the new generations the treasures and values we have in common, so that never again will man despise his own brother in humanity and never again will conflicts or wars be unleashed in the name of an ideology that despises a culture or religion”.

And yet, tragically, the very demonic forces that Europe was called to bridle and neutralise eventually broke loose and all but destroyed the existing system of international security. As though from a volcano, the magma of old and seemingly half-forgotten attitudes poured into the world’s political reality: the cult of force, imperial appetites, great-power arrogance, the humiliation of the weak, economic blackmail. Saint John Paul II was listened to, then, but not heard. Or perhaps he was heard, but not for long, because national and even personal egoisms proved more alluring. In this situation, the great Pope would warn us once again: “War brings with it a disproportionate growth of hatred, destruction and cruelty. It cannot be denied that it also manifests new capabilities of human courage, heroism and patriotism, but the fact remains that it is the reckoning of the losses that prevails. That reckoning prevails more and more, since each day sees an increase in the destructive capacity of the weapons invented by modern technology. Not only those who directly bring about wars are responsible for them, but also those who fail to do all they can to prevent them”.

Yet above every present challenge brought about by war, the defining appeal of Saint John Paul II was and remains his call: “Do not be afraid!”

Myroslaw Marynovych