49 : A thousand people in the building, all singing this hymn

Episode 49: Paul describes how and why, as an adult, he rediscovered and fell in love with his Ukrainian Greek Catholic heritage and the Byzantine (an Eastern) rite. He draws on St Paul to sum up 'the Christian faith and the Christian ethos' and especially to explain how the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church continues to flourish despite historical poverty and persecution.  

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Society of St John Chrysostom

An article introducing Eastern Christian spirituality

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Transcript

 You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways we're living our faith today. I'm grateful for Pope Francis who used the image of a caravan, a diverse group of people travelling together on a sometimes chaotic journey together. And that image that Pope Francis gave us has helped to shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations. And if you're enjoying these conversations, it helps if you rate and review them on the platform where you're listening. Thank you.

Listeners, today's episode was actually recorded before Pope Francis died. You'll hear in a moment that we're talking about Eastern rite churches, particularly the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. You may have seen at Pope Francis' funeral the Eastern rite priests participating in his funeral service. And if you didn't know already, I hope you'll find this conversation helpful as I did to find out more about Eastern Christianity. 

Listeners, welcome to this episode of the podcast. I'm joined today by Paul. We're gonna talk about a different branch of the church. I don't know if I'm even using the right word, but we'll talk about it and we'll see where we get to. Welcome, Paul. 

Hello. 

Let's just start with your childhood, shall we, Paul? Have you always been a Catholic?

I have. I've always been a Ukrainian Greek Catholic. Yeah. So I live in Hampshire now, originally from Yorkshire. My grandparents, all four of them, came to this country after the second World War and settled here in West Yorkshire. My parents were born here, but they were raised as Ukrainian Greek Catholics and very much as Ukrainians. Ukrainian was their first language. They learned English when they went to school. But interestingly, when my parents got married, like a lot of people from their generation, they began practising as Roman Catholics. And I think there are lots of complex reasons for that. So although I've always been canonically Ukrainian Greek Catholic, I think I only really ever went to Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches for funerals. So everything I knew growing up was Roman Catholic. And then later on in my life, maybe seven or eight years ago, I became more interested in that heritage and really fell in love with it from a theological point of view as well as the liturgy, which is lovely, and have sort of reintegrated myself more fully into that. Having said that, there was a bit of an interregnum there because from about the age of 16, I stopped going to church and really only came back probably fifteen years later. 

Right. Big gap. We really need to talk about Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Roman Catholics and what's different there. But let's just focus a little bit, if we may, on that fifteen year gap. What is it that drew you back after fifteen years?

Lots of things, really. I found that my life wasn't where it wanted to be, where I wanted it to be rather. I felt a bit lost. I felt that the things which I thought were fulfilling weren't. Also, there was a part of me that was looking back at when I was, you know, a convinced Christian and thinking, Well, that person was actually a better person. And going, Well, how can I get back to that? And that's really where that journey started. 

Okay. 

You know, very gradually, you sort of hear this call over a few years and you kind of ignore it. And then you very, very slowly take baby steps back. It is a process that takes years, probably about five years in all.

But you decided to come back to the Ukrainian Greek heritage? 

Not initially. No. So I originally went back to what I knew, which was the Western Catholicism. Did that for a few years. Got involved as well. I enjoyed singing. There was a parish where I was leading the singing there, which I greatly enjoyed. It was really when my wife and I were getting married and making preparations for that and what we were going to do for it because my wife's actually a non-denominational Christian. So we're a bit of an ecumenical household. One of the things which was kind of a bit of a sticking point is that in the Latin church, generally speaking, if you're both Catholics, there will be a nuptial Mass. That would have been a problem for us because my wife wouldn't be able to receive communion And also, in fairness, has a different understanding of what the Eucharist is. So there is that divide there. So we were thinking about what to do, which church. I was speaking with a Ukrainian priest friend of mine, and he pointed out that the liturgy and Eucharist and the marriage ceremony are completely separate in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, so that that wouldn't be an issue. And also, the Cathedral in London is beautiful. It's a beautiful place to get married. I had already been there a couple of times beforehand because there's a monthly Divine Liturgy, which is what we call the Mass in English. Everything else, otherwise, is in Ukrainian. It really came together. This is a great place to get married. It doesn't exclude anybody. That's what we did. From that point on, I really did a very deep dive into what I'd been born into and what I'd been missing out on all this time. And so I did a lot of theological reading and really just fell in love with this very different flavour of theology. Haven't looked back. 

That's great. May we just dig into this a little bit. I was saying to you before we started recording that we're unpicking some of my ignorance here because I thought I knew what a Ukrainian Catholic was because when I went to school, there were a number of Ukrainian families at school with me. And so I thought being a Ukrainian Catholic was being a Ukrainian person who's a Catholic. And I knew there was - there's a Ukrainian Catholic church near me. and I know that Ukrainian Catholic churches are in full communion with Rome, but I assumed that the liturgy inside would be the same. I had not realised until I began speaking to you and preparing to talk to you today that it's an Eastern rite. And so you were very carefully saying Ukrainian Greek Catholic, and I was thinking, Oh, that must be something different then, but that is what Ukrainian Catholics are, right, it's an Eastern rite tradition. And so that's really interesting to me because I hadn't realised that there are Eastern rites in communion with Rome. I thought there was Western Christianity in Rome and Eastern Christian traditions separately. So tell us a little bit more about that then, just explain a little bit about, I mean, I know there's a long complicated history going back many centuries, but just in a nutshell, what is it about the Ukrainian Greek church? What does it look like? 

Where to begin? Well, as you kind of touched upon there, if you're at all familiar with Eastern Orthodox Church, then it looks exactly like that. The reason for that is that Eastern and Western Christendom were more or less united until 1054 when various disagreements led to excommunications, and then things developed separately from there. Although that could be misleading because they had already developed separately even while we were in union, so they were quite different. Five hundred and fifty years later, the church in Ukraine re-established communion with Rome while retaining all their traditions and rites. Even saints that had been canonised during the schism. So that all came over into the Church. And there were various reasons for that. One was their mother church, Constantinople, was now under the Ottoman Empire. It became very poor. It was quite difficult to keep communication going. Religious education was really poor in Ukraine and Russia at the time. Even a lot of priests didn't really know their faith. But around this time, you had this massive counter reformation, and the Jesuits were everywhere with really very high quality education. And so a combination of these things led to the bishops in Kyiv to go, Well, it just makes sense to re-establish communion with Rome, to return to the to the universal church and to get all these benefits to really reinvigorate church life because it had been stagnating, really. Ukraine was also at that time part of Poland Lithuania, which is obviously a Catholic power. And so, politically, it was also advantageous to be counted as Catholics. But, yeah, it really means that that the church looks very differently. It thinks very differently. It practises things very differently. The first things you might notice, typically, if you go into a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, you'll see icons everywhere. That's to do with theological disputes in the in the East, in the first millennium, about images. And there was a long period of iconoclasm where all religious imagery was banned. That lasted about probably a hundred years or so, which meant that after that period, the use of icons really flourished and really became embedded in church life, and the theology of the church. There are other things, like, we use leavened bread in the Eucharist, for example. That's administered from the chalice on the spoon, so you get both forms of the Eucharist at once. 

Oh. 

It's quite a convenient way of doing things. A big difference for a lot of people is the fact that we allow married men to become priests. Again, that's something that's always been the case in the East. In the West, I think clerical celibacy was imposed as a discipline in the twelfth century, I think. So there were actually married priests in the West for longer than there haven't been. But even then, attitudes were slightly different. I think in the West, you had married priests, but there was this expectation that you wouldn't have sexual relations with your wife after your ordination. And in some cases, I think certainly in the in the early centuries, you'd be expected to live separately. So there were always different attitudes towards the clerical state in that sense. Whereas in the East, it's never really been an issue. You've always had priests with families. 

Just to unpick that a little bit. So priests can be married. Do they need to get married before being ordained, or can they get married after being ordained? Are there any kind of rules around that? 

They can't marry after their ordination. And I guess that's actually a similarity in that once you have made that commitment to live that priesthood life, that commitment to God, that is your primary commitment. If you're not married by that point, then your commitment is solely to God. In the Orthodox church, generally, the expectation is that if you're not married by the time you're ordained, then you're expected to become a monk because that is the way that you live the celibate priestly life. 

Are there deacons in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church? And are they all men? Just checking.

They are all men, and we do have them. This is another really interesting difference in the history of the two churches because both East and West, the diaconate died out as a permanent vocation. Again, sort of around the twelfth century, I think. It's also another way in which East and West differed because you always had deaconesses in the church of Constantinople. Although their roles were different, they were ordained in the same way as deacons, as a major order. You probably wouldn't have heard about this because stuff that happens in the Orthodox church tends to stay in the Orthodox press. But the Church of Alexandria in Egypt, I think one of their churches in Zimbabwe, ordained a deaconess last year, I think it was, or the year before, which caused some controversy, as you might imagine. And interestingly, she took on liturgically the exact same role as a deacon. So ministering at the altar, giving out communion. So that's very interesting, but it was never abolished as a ministry, and the ordination texts still exist.

And are there conversations in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church about women priests or women deacons in the same way that there are in the Roman Catholic Church?

I don't think there are. I may be speaking out of turn here, but my impression is that on an issue of that magnitude, although we are a separate church in communion, I think there's an attitude that something like this has to be decided at the highest level, that actually the church as a whole should make a decision on something as big as that. I mean, certainly, I know that female ordination to the priesthood is not something they'd ever consider because, John Paul II certainly ruled that out in 1994, I think. And I think Pope Francis has done so more recently as well while seemingly leaving the door open to the diaconate. So I don't know that there are discussions about that at hierarchical level. It may well be, as is often the case with these things, that there are discussions about this at the academic level. There is very much so in the Orthodox church. Orthodox academics talk about this all the time. I've probably not done it justice at all, but the late Kallistos Ware, who, certainly in Orthodox circles, very, very well known monk, bishop, and theologian, who was converted to Orthodoxy from Anglicanism in the sixties, I think. He was very much in favour of the restoration of deaconesses in the Orthodox church. 

Can we just explore a little bit then? I understand that in a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, there'll be lots of icons. I've had a look at that, and I love icons in principle. But what about the community of people that belong to the church? What does that look like? Is that same as I would experience in a Roman Catholic church? People might meet for a cup of tea after Mass or stand about talking after and become friends outside of the services? 

Yeah. Absolutely. And more than just a cup of tea. Being in Hampshire most of the time now, on most Sundays I'm at a Roman church just out of necessity. We don't have a Ukrainian church around here. But I do go into London once a month for - I serve at the altar for the monthly English liturgy, which is where I'm going this afternoon, actually. And that's also a practicality of having two young children and not really being in a position to travel to London every Sunday. But before that, I was going to London every Sunday and initially at the Cathedral in Mayfair. And something which was always very distracting during the liturgy is that downstairs, they are preparing all this Ukrainian food. It smells delicious, and that was so that people would then go downstairs and have a meal after the liturgy. 

Right. Because people will have more likely travelled.

Yeah. Since the war, lots of mission points have popped up around London and elsewhere to accommodate the vast influx of people. I'd be very surprised if anybody there on a Sunday lives in Mayfair. That would be very unlikely. So everyone's having to travel in from somewhere. So, yes, I think parish life looks very much the same. And we have a small mission point in Westminster where we have English Divine Liturgies on Sundays. Very much the same there. People come together for a little bit to eat and a drink either at the back of the church or at a pub, and we're sort of slowly establishing a community there. And we have people there from Eastern churches, Russians, Romanians, and some Ukrainians, but also a lot of English enquirers as well. People who, for various reasons, have fallen in love with the rite and the theology and so come there instead.

So you mentioned the war there, drawing more people from Ukraine into London and Britain, I suppose. What is it like at the moment knowing that there's a war going on in Ukraine where your grandparents are from and where maybe you have family? I don't know. 

Naturally, it's very painful to see that happening, especially if you're at all familiar with the history of the relationship between Moscow and Kyiv, which is really just a replay of what's happening now as most neighbours of of Russia will be familiar with. I often think, though, would I feel a lot different if it was another of Russia's neighbours? I often come to the conclusion that I'm not sure I would feel that differently actually because, really, the principles are the same. It's a profoundly unchristian thing to do. It's completely insane, and it's causing enormous suffering for really very little reason. And whether that was, you know, Georgia or Armenia or Lithuania or Finland, I think, actually, when it gets down to it, I probably wouldn't feel any different. I would probably feel just as pained by it. But it just happens to be happening to people with whom I'm tied by blood and culture. It's very difficult. 

And are there prayers then in the Divine Liturgy services for people affected by what's happening in Ukraine at the moment and prayers for peace? 

Yes. Absolutely. We've always had in our rite bidding prayers, so to speak. So we call them litanies. So I think it's something I should point out actually - in the Divine Liturgy, and actually all the services of the Church, everything is sung. We sing absolutely everything. So the priest's parts and the congregation's parts and the readings are all sung. There are several litanies throughout the liturgy, and there’re various sort of pleas and their responses, Lord have mercy, or the Ukrainian господи, помилуй. Most of those are set forms. So over the centuries, they've been set as certain things we pray for. But the nice thing is that there's also this flexibility there. So there are points in those litanies where the priest can insert additional prayers, certainly. But at this time, there are always prayers for Ukraine. One of the actual really moving things when I used to go to the Cathedral on Sundays was after the end of every liturgy, everybody would sing this hymn to Ukraine. It's kind of like a parallel national anthem, but it's also kind of a religious hymn as well. And you're in this building, which I think seats about 900 people. There are three Divine Liturgies every Sunday, and they're all full. And there's lots of people standing, so you're talking at least a thousand people in the building, all singing this hymn, just beautiful. Every week, it brought me to tears. I would think very much about my grandparents. It's weird. I'm kind of welling up thinking about it now. There's that incredible unity there. 

The emotions must be strong for such a terrible thing that's happening and wanting it to end, but not actually having much power to make anything go differently. It is overwhelming in some ways. But let's try not to be overwhelmed just now and think about something bigger than the three year history of the war. Let's talk about the John Chrysostom Society that I know you have a role in. I think listeners might be interested to know a bit more about what that is for or who that is for.

 So it's an ecumenical society, which was established in its current thought form in 1926. So we're approaching our centenary there, which is quite exciting. It was founded as a Catholic society of laypeople and clergy. Our chairman is a bi-ritual priest, so he is Latin Catholic, but he has faculties to celebrate in the Byzantine rite. Because like me, he encountered it during part of his role in the ecumenical movement. And like me and a lot of people, just fell in love with it. We've had various roles in the past. Primarily, it's about promoting the Eastern Churches to Western Christians and also doing what we can to promote unity between the churches as well. Our patron, Saint John Chrysostom, is certainly at least very well known. He died in AD 407 and he was Archbishop of Constantinople. A bit of a firebrand who was not afraid to tell truth to power. He's famed for a homily in the presence of the emperor and the empress where he is excoriating the empress's licentiousness. There's a famous painting of that, I think. And his name Chrysostom means golden-tongued. That has to do with him being a theologian par excellence. It's the Society of St John Chrysostom because it very much represents that tradition at its best, really. So we're a membership organisation. You can join the society for a small subscription. Literally, the first thing that we did in 1926 was to organise a Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine rite in Westminster Cathedral. And a temporary iconostasis was created, so the icon screen, to be put up in Westminster. And the stated aim of that was to make people more familiar with Eastern churches and to encourage friendship between them. And that's something that we continue to do. So the monthly Divine Liturgy in English at the Ukrainian Cathedral is something that we were asked to do by the then bishop. So that is something that's provided by the Society. The mission point, we're there every Sunday. That's something that we've done in partnership with the Cathedral. We're hoping to do more in that direction as well to promote awareness of the Eastern churches and to foster friendship and unity between us. 

That's great. I'll put a link to the Society in the episode notes so people can have a little look and find out more if they don't know already. I'm certainly really glad that we've had this conversation. It’s spurred me on to look properly at the Eastern traditions. It's been really interesting for me, actually, especially because I already have seen icons in some settings and really appreciate them. But actually to see what a central part they are of the Church, it's given me a way in. It's given me a way that feels like I can understand something about what this is about, even though it looks so different in other ways from what I'm used to. As we work to the end, Paul, I thought we just need to spend a minute or two more finding out more about your own faith. We talked about some of the detail around East and West. So one of the ways I do that sometimes is to ask people about if there's a piece of scripture that is meaningful to you or a prayer. I mean, you've given us a little glimpse there with the hymn to Ukraine, but what is it that nourishes you on a day to day basis?

Well, I pray parts of the Byzantine office every day, and that's certainly very nourishing. Usually, lauds and compline. I think it's the same in the Western tradition that that's studied with Psalms. And I've always found praying the psalter very enriching. I kind of feel like all of scripture is contained within the Psalms, which is very beautiful. I read the daily readings as well. That keeps me ticking over. But I think in terms of specific parts of scripture, I think my absolute favourite line of scriptures, 2 Corinthians 12 : 9, where Saint Paul's recounting his experience of meeting Christ. The line that's always stuck with me is Christ telling Paul, My power is made perfect in weakness. Just in one line, completely encapsulates the Christian faith and the Christian ethos. When I was sort of thinking about things ahead of this chat, I realised actually that that applies very much to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church because it was a banned organization in the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1990, I think it was. Basically, the churches, the parishes of the church, were taken over by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the faith went underground. It absolutely flourished underground. And we talk about the faith being a tree that's watered by the blood of martyrs, and that certainly happened during that period. The way people talked about it at the time, once it arose from the catacombs is that I think everybody was surprised by just how much it instantly flourished after being made legal again. You know, today, you look at the statistics about things like church attendance. Ukrainian Greek Catholics who are baptised, about 40% of them go to church regularly. If you look at the Orthodox churches in Ukraine, it's more like 12%. If you look at Russia, I was looking at the Russian state statistics, and only about 4% of people who are baptised Russian Orthodox go to church at Easter. That history is a really good illustration of that line of scripture, that actually you have a church which was driven underground, which has flourished, and you have one which had official recognition from the state and was allowed to operate, was basically spiritually stripped of everything that made it a church, the fruits of that show. 

That's a really good way to draw our conversation to an end, Paul. Thank you so much. I've learned so much from our conversation in preparing for it. I feel like I have a much deeper understanding of Ukrainian Catholic people around me and, you know, I won't feel the same walking past that Ukrainian church now, just for having a much broader understanding of what's going on and some of the history too, but also how alive that Church is today. So thank you so much for sharing all of that, and I encourage listeners to say a little prayer for Ukraine after hearing this conversation today. 

Very much appreciated.

Thanks so much for your time, Paul. 

Thank you, Theresa.

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow All Kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X, Twitter, and Facebook accounts @kindsofCatholic. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.