One spring morning in 1987, 12-year-old Maria Kyzyn, from the village of Hrushiv in west Ukraine, declared that she had received a vision of the Madonna and Child. The apparition, she said, hovered above the dome of the local wooden church of the Holy Trinity, once attended by members of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, or Ukrainian Catholics, until closed by the Soviets in the late Forties. Groups of local men and women began to gather in the churchyard. Many of them claimed to have witnessed the apparition. Pilgrims descended on Hrushiv from distant parts of Ukraine and beyond. But despite the expanding perestroika of the era, the Soviet authorities barred access to the site.
What possible connections are there between those events 35 years ago and the courage of Ukrainians facing the disasters of war today? The apparitions occurred just one year before the millennial celebrations in Ukraine marking the conversion of Vladimir the Great in 988 and the origins of Slavonic Christianity. The Ukrainian Catholics, Byzantine in liturgy yet linked to Rome, claim descent from the time of Vladimir’s baptism. Yet the Church has suffered oppression down the centuries, and especially since the Sovietisation of Ukraine between the two world wars. In parallel, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, with historical links to both Russian and Greek Orthodoxy, now independent of Moscow’s Patriarchate, is also a target of Putin’s ire.
Putin claims “Holy Rus”’, comprising Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, constitutes an inseparable spiritual and territorial trinity, a living “icon” of Christ’s presence in the world. Russian Orthodoxy, as Putin and the Moscow Patriarchate insist, is the one true Church, Rome being apostate, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in schism since Constantinople recognised it as an independent (autocephalous) Church in 2018. The notion bolsters Putin’s right to “protect” Ukraine from the apostates, heretics and fascists, who seek to destroy Holy Rus’ by giving impetus to Ukrainian political and religious independence.
A year after the apparitions, I was travelling through Europe researching claims of miracles and apparitions: the weeping plastic plaque of a Virgin at Syracuse in Sicily, the marvels of Padre Pio, liquefaction of blood in Naples Cathedral, apparitions of the Virgin at Medjugorje, and many more. How should a Catholic historian or journalist chronicle such occurrences? Claims of miraculous intervention often serve political agenda, secular and ecclesiastical. By the same token, they can be powerful expressions of popular religious imagination.
A film producer friend asked if I would research and write up the story of the Hrushiv apparitions, working with the Catholic documentary director John Kirby. The witnesses were reluctant to be filmed because of continuing Soviet oppression. Local authorities said the incident was “a political provocation”.
We obtained footage of Ukrainian Catholics under the Soviets, and filmed contemporary sequences of revived Ukrainian Catholic liturgy in Kyiv and Lviv. We visited expatriate Ukrainian Catholic communities in Ottawa and Toronto, where we grappled with the complex history of Christianity in Ukraine.
Tensions have existed down the centuries between Russian Orthodoxy, Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Ukrainian Catholicism – which earnt the description “Church of Martyrdom”. After the Second World War, Stalin accused Ukrainian Catholics of collaborating with Nazis against the Jews during the war. Eight bishops and 1,000 priests were executed. Many more priests and nuns were imprisoned or exiled. There were tales of worshippers exercising their faith without priests, meeting in forest clearings, reciting the words of the Mass, excluding the Consecration, a liturgical stole on a makeshift altar representing the celebrant. In Gorbachev’s day, they were denounced as provocateurs leading the bid for Ukrainian independence.
At a safe house in Toronto, I met Josyp Terelya, who claimed to have witnessed the Hrushiv apparition. He had been tortured and imprisoned for his outspoken promotion of Ukrainian separatism. Terelya’s report of the Virgin’s messages had resonances of Fatima: pray the Rosary for the conversion of Russia and avoidance of a third world war. He said that the Virgin held a rosary in her hand, with amber and blue beads – for him, clear evidence of her support of Ukrainian nationalism.
Terelya’s devout religiosity was matched by fierce secular political conviction. I could understand the driving force behind the apparitions in Hrushiv for Ukrainian Catholics who see their faith in terms of martyrdoms, millennia and Russian oppression. At the same time, I was struck by John Paul II’s characterisation of Marian apparitions through the 19th and 20th centuries as “Mary’s journey through time and space towards the Second Millennium”. But was he speaking literally or metaphorically?
I ended my research on Catholic “signs and wonders” with a mix of guarded belief and healthy scepticism. I tended to see many of them more as products of religious imagination than as supernatural events. Meanwhile, I was deeply impressed by the attachment of Eastern Christianity to sacred icons whose depictions, crafted with both artistry and prayer, look “out” upon the world, as well as being perceived by it. The apparition at Hrushiv was reminiscent, witnesses said, of a popular Ukrainian icon, Our Lady of Compassion. The importance of the phenomenon at Hrushiv, it seemed, was not so much the excitement generated by a “supernatural” event as the significance of Our Lady’s iconography of tenderness, pity and compassion. Meanwhile, I found it difficult to believe that the Mother of God had taken time out of eternity to brandish a Rosary in the Ukrainian national colours.
Josyp Terelya died in 2009 with a popular following among the Ukrainian Catholic diaspora, and a reputation for sanctity. He had undergone much suffering for his faith and patriotism.
The most lasting impression of my travels in search of the miraculous, however, was sight of Ukraine’s most celebrated icon, the Virgin Orans (the Virgin Praying), which depicts Mary praying with arms outstretched. Situated on the wall of the apse of the former cathedral of Kyiv, Saint Sophia, it dates back to the reign of Yaroslav the Wise in the llth century. The wall is known as the “Indestructible”. Legend has it that as long as the Virgin stretches out her arms over Kyiv, the city will survive. The cloth on her belt is said to be ready to wipe away the tears of those who suffer.
In the Twenties, the Soviets called for the building’s destruction. But it was saved and declared a museum. During the Soviet Spring there were plans to return the building for worship, delayed because of squabbles between the different Christian denominations, including Ukrainian Catholics. In the first week of March, BBC journalist Clive Myrie reported his visit there. He found Christians, Jews and Muslims united in prayer for peace beneath the great icon.
Sacred icons, the glory of Byzantine spirituality, such as the claims of Marian apparitions, have power to move, console and heal. The Ukrainian people, whatever their denomination or faith, will be much in need of the nation’s remarkable icons in months and years ahead: not least the Orans, the icon of the Praying Mother.
John Cornwell is director of the Science & Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge. His latest book is Church Interrupted: Havoc & Hope, the Tender Revolt of Pope Francis (Chronicle Prism, 2021).
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