POZNAN, Poland (OSV News) -- For Ukrainian Catholics, St. John Paul II’s voice brought a "taste of freedom," something that still drives defenders of the country following the full-scale Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, said Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
He spoke to OSV News on the sidelines of a conference titled "John Paul II - to Read History, to Form History" at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan on March 27, organized around the 20th anniversary of the death of the pope from Poland.
"Pope John Paul II was our voice," Major Archbishop Shevchuk said. For nations like Ukraine that after the fall of the Berlin Wall started to regain independence from the bloody communist regime in Moscow, "he was the voice of those whose voice had been taken away."
"And this is exactly what we felt in Ukraine and beyond. ... He became the voice not only of our conscience, but also of our freedom. He really is the pope of Ukraine's sovereignty. The historic event of pope John Paul II’s meeting with Gorbachev in December ‘89 gave rise to the legalization of our church in Ukraine," Major Archbishop Shevchuk said.
Mikhail Gorbachev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was the first Soviet leader to meet the pope who contributed to the fall of communism in his native Poland six months earlier.
On Dec. 1, 1989, the pope hosted Gorbachev at the Vatican in what was described by the papal personal secretary, now-Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, as a "cordial, open and sincere" meeting in the book by German Vatican correspondent Joachim Jauer titled "Urbi et Gorbi."
The pope was preparing for the meeting by refreshing his knowledge of Russian. "Every day he read the Russian translation of the Bible," Jauer wrote in his book, as "Gorbachev wanted to talk to the pope without witnesses." During the meeting, he said, "the Soviet secretary general was said to make a personal statement about his attitude to Christianity."
The pope's "intercession in those days for the rights of the church in the Soviet Union gave us freedom, literally," Major Archbishop Shevchuk told OSV News.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was banned March 8-9, 1946, at the Lviv synod, also known as the pseudo-synod, when it was decided that the Greek Catholics would be transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church in Soviet-ruled Ukraine. The ban was lifted in 1990.
"No one knew whether the Soviet Union would continue for a long time, or whether it would dissolve. No one could have predicted that. But John Paul II was truly the pope of freedom and sovereignty for Ukraine and our church," the leader of Ukrainian Catholics told OSV News.
The second milestone in John Paul’s support for the freedom cause of Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed and was officially dissolved in December 1991 was the June 2001 pilgrimage of John Paul to Ukraine. It happened at the time when Ukraine's economy had struggled significantly, and both social and political reforms failed to fully transform the country into a European-style state.
The pope's "pilgrimage to Ukraine in 2001 was a pilgrimage that affirmed the independence of our country and added to our subjectivity," Major Archbishop Shevchuk said. "At that time, on the one hand, Ukraine was celebrating the 10th anniversary of independence, but politically and internationally it was a member of this alliance of the Independent States. It was an attempt to reconstruct the Soviet Union under new circumstances. But the pope spoke from Ukraine and about Ukraine to the whole world as a free, democratic, European country."
"Even more, when he came to us, he spoke to us in Ukrainian!" the prelate said. "For us Ukrainians, to hear the pope addressing our people in the language of this nation for the first time in history was something truly unprecedented, unprecedented, unprecedented," the Ukrainian church leader emphasized.
"The internal situation in Ukraine was really not simple at that time. President (Leonid) Kuchma and the Ukrainian government were using the Russian language. The Ukrainian language, which was – according to the constitution – the state language, was marginalized, it had to be defended. The pope spoke Ukrainian to the Ukrainian president, and it was a better Ukrainian language."
Major Archbishop Shevchuk said that John Paul helped build the "subjectivity" of the struggling nation.
"The pope spoke to cultural activists about the value of Ukrainian culture ... science," he said. "In the Soviet Union, education and science were instruments of communist ideology."
Major Archbishop Shevchuk recalled that John Paul specifically wanted to meet young people when in Ukraine on June 23-27, 2001.
He wanted to tell them "that freedom is also a challenge. Sometimes, freedom can be even more challenging than slavery, because it needs your personal effort to develop it, to defend it, not to give it away to anyone," Major Archbishop Shevchuk said.
"He said to the youth: in your hands is the future of your country. Ukraine will be what you build it. This freedom entails responsibility. Do not give this responsibility to politicians," the prelate said, recalling the pope's words.
Those words "perhaps in a sense provoked that these young Ukrainians to defend their state" – first during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, Major Archbishop Shevchuk said.
The protests of late 2004 initially succeeded in preventing Kremlin-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovych from stealing the Ukrainian presidency and made possible the election of his reformist rival, Viktor Yushchenko, but the latter was unable to lead Ukraine fully to the member state of European Union, the Atlantic Council wrote.
But it was John Paul who gave Ukrainians the boost that they could decide for themselves.
The visit in 2001 was not only "some good words, teaching an intellectual message," but a real "taste of freedom," Archbishop Shevchuk said. "To the extent that one old grandmother told me if the pope comes to Ukraine, communism will not return."
"This taste of freedom is something that makes a revolution real in the life of a person, in the life of the church, in the life of the nation, in the life of the state. And this taste of freedom, these young people who are defending Ukraine today, will not give up to anyone," Major Archbishop Shevchuk told OSV News.
"Even more. Some of our soldiers who were prisoners of war and returned from captivity, told me that even in a Russian prison, with their hands tied and their eyes covered, they were at a higher degree of freedom than those who were torturing them." Russian soldiers, he said, "understood this, and it made them so angry," because they saw "Ukrainians are free."
"This is the testimony of these boys, these girls, who may no longer personally remember John Paul II. But their spirit is the spirit of dignity that he discovered in us, in this post-Soviet, post-communist country," Major Archbishop Shevchuk said.
John Paul, he said, is not only a memory from the past. "He is evolving. He really is something prophetic, something that surprises everyone. Neither Moscow nor the United States knows what to do with those Ukrainians who live this spirit, the spirit of the cause, and their European, human, democratic values."
Remembering April 2005, when John Paul died and lay in state, Major Archbishop Shevchuk said he "had just arrived in Rome when John Paul II was being brought from the Apostolic Palace to (St. Peter's) Basilica. I saw those crowds of people who stood for hours with their families, just to touch, to come and pay their last respect to John Paul II. I witnessed the funeral, when all of Rome stopped," he told OSV News.
"They all felt that the greatest humanist of the 20th century had passed away to eternity."
(Paulina Guzik is international editor for OSV News.)
