In his writings and speeches, Pope Francis has often referred to those on the peripheries of society and the economy. But what about those on the peripheries of the Church?
One such group has been on the peripheries of both Church and empire for a full century now: the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church (RBCC), the smallest and most neglected of the Eastern Catholic Churches. The other 22 Eastern Catholic Churches in the world (Ukrainian, Melkite, Coptic, Maronite, etc) have often been neglected, but none as much as the RBCC.
This Church is called “Russian” because her roots are in Russia and she retains Russian Orthodox usages in liturgy, spirituality and much else. She is called “Greek” or “Byzantine” because her life is lived according to what used to be called the “Greek rite”, that is, the Byzantine liturgical tradition. (This usage of “Greek” is a holdover from a time when it was common to speak of the Church as being either the Greek-speaking East or the Latin-speaking West. Since there are, even today, many Latin or Roman Catholics in Russia, this retention of “Greek” is useful.) She is called “Catholic” because she is in full communion with the Catholic Church and Bishop of Rome, and thus with the 1.5 billion Catholics around the world.
Today the RBCC has indeed become even more catholic (as in universal), with parishes not just in Russia but also in Australia, America, Argentina, Brazil, France and elsewhere. And yet even in such major and powerful countries as America or France, the RBCC remains on the margins, having no bishop anywhere or structure to ensure her future.
Why is she an orphan on the peripheries? In an era when many questions of identity are hotly contested by purists of all sorts, the hybrid nature of the RBCC makes her a politically unattractive and inconvenient presence best kept hidden away. She is an embarrassment to the Russian government and Orthodox Church because she is a constant reminder that no church should be subject to earthly rulers, as the Russian Orthodox Church has been under tsars, Stalin, and now Putin. She is an embarrassment to Rome for she is a constant reminder of a model of ecumenism Rome zealously pursued from the 16th century to Vatican II, but has since rejected. Thus nobody who counts wants the RBCC around, and all the powerful people would prefer that she just disappear.
Yet she has not disappeared – she has in fact just come off a splendid congress in June in San Felice del Benaco on Lake Garda. Thanks to the tireless work, heroic patience and perseverance of the long-suffering Australian Archpriest Lawrence Cross, Russian Catholics from South America, North America, Europe and Australia were able to gather together to overcome their sense of exile and isolation, and to plan for the future.
This gathering was held on the centenary of the first Russian Byzantine Catholic synod, presided over by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, when, then as now, the cry went up: “Give us a father! We need a bishop to ensure our sacramental life and future.” But that synod was short-lived, soon to be swept away by the blood and violence of the October Revolution, which led to the destruction of thousands of churches, convents and schools, and millions of believers across the emerging Soviet Union. Those few Catholics who survived often did so by going underground or joining (usually under coercion) the state-sponsored Russian Orthodox Church, remaining on the peripheries from then until now.
Many thought that after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eastern Catholics in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere would now be able to live freely. And for Ukrainian Catholics that has largely been the case. Indeed, the resurgence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, now more than five million strong around the world, has been nothing short of a miracle.
But across the border in Russia the situation has proven very different – not as perilous, to be sure, as under the communists, but also not nearly as free as in Ukraine, to say nothing of the rest of Europe. The RBCC remains on the margins because both Moscow (understandably) and Rome (shamefully and bewilderingly) want it there.
What is so frightening about the presence of a handful of RBCC communities in Russia and other parts of the world? Who is threatened by what they need and want?
At the congress in Italy this year, where I was a keynote speaker, a series of resolutions was drafted showing that what is wanted is very modest indeed, and cannot possibly be thought threatening to anybody who is not clinically paranoid.
The chief request, as it has been for decades now, is very simple. The RBCC, precisely if it is to be a fully functioning and flourishing Church, needs what every Catholic Church properly so called needs: apostolic leadership ensuring sacramental life. Thus the congress asked really for only one thing from Rome: a bishop, a bishop who will be a real father and shepherd to RBCC faithful inside Russia and outside. Many of these parishes have clergy who are well advanced in years and nobody in training to replace them. A bishop can sponsor seminarians and then ordain them, ensuring continuity to these communities when the time comes.
To this request, tiresome people tediously raise the same objections as they have for decades: isn’t the RBCC too small to merit its own apostolic leadership? How many of these people really are Russians anyway? Why can’t they just join either the Russian Orthodox or the Latin Rite Catholic Church?
The answer to all three questions is so simple even a child could grasp it: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Rome has, in the teeth of opposition from other Christians and even other Catholics, given episcopal leadership and structure to small and equally “controversial” groups in the Catholic Church, including Opus Dei, various military ordinariates, the Personal Apostolic Administration of Saint John Mary Vianney, for “traditionalist” clergy in Brazil, and, perhaps most germane of all, the Anglican ordinariates in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia.
In all these cases Rome stared down the opposition and brought these groups in from the periphery by means of a generous and creative configuration of ecclesial structures for groups even smaller than the RBCC. Such admirable flexibility was even extended pastorally to formerly schismatic groups and to others outside our Catholic communion, but the same has not been offered to this smallest of the Catholic churches which has paid an enormous price in blood for her fidelity to the Chair of St Peter in Rome.
Will Rome now relent and respond generously after decades of neglect? At our congress in San Felice del Benaco, our first act was to enthrone a large and beautiful icon of Our Lady of Fatima, and to seek her intercession. In this centenary year of that apparition, in which the fate and future of Russia loomed so large, perhaps it is not too late to ask her, whom the Russian tradition hymns as the Bogoroditsa, to lean on Pope Francis to bring the RBCC in from the peripheries and to give them what all Catholics by nature and by right deserve: a father.
Dr Adam DeVille is a professor at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana
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