The Paths of the Interwar Union

The review was prepared within the framework of the joint Book Review project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Svirid, A.N. (2012). The Uniate Church in Western Belarus (1921-1939). Brest: BrSU, 218 pp.

Review prepared by Father Andrei Krot.

The monograph by the Brest historian Aliaksandr Nikolaevich Svirid, The Uniate Church in Western Belarus (1921-1939), may be called long-awaited. There has been no complete systematic survey of the history of the revival of the Union in Western Belarus in the 1920s and 1930s in contemporary historiography, and it is precisely this niche that the author of the monograph seeks to fill.

The monograph consists of four chapters. Already in the introduction, the author writes that the history of the Uniate Church is one of the most vivid examples of diametrically opposed attitudes among different social groups and historians toward one and the same phenomenon, but every opinion must be based on facts. Therefore, the historian begins his work by studying a broad range of historical research and sources. In the first chapter, he identifies several groups of researchers of the history of the Uniate Church in the 1920s and 1930s, among which he devotes the greatest attention to Belarusian Soviet researchers and contemporary Belarusian researchers who worked in the 1990s and 2000s.

In the studies of Soviet historians, the author emphasizes obvious ideological premises: the Union was used for the Polonization of the Belarusian people and the consolidation of the power of the exploiters; it was a weapon of anti-Soviet intrigues; the working masses did not accept the Union because they adopted the ideas of the Communist Party of Western Belarus, and so on. He sees the positive aspect in the introduction of a large body of factual material into scholarly circulation. In the works of contemporary researchers, A. Svirid notes many new tendencies, at times opposing views, when some historians see the Union as a bearer of Belarusian culture and national self-consciousness, while others categorically disagree with this position.

The researcher pays special attention to the existence of several paths for the revival of the Union on the territory of Poland in 1921-1939 and above all examines two of them: the Greek Catholic rite and the Catholic Church of the Byzantine-Slavic rite. In interwar Poland, the Greek Catholic rite referred to the rite of the Uniate Church that had survived in Western Ukraine under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Under Polish legislation, the Greek Catholic Church could exist only in Western Ukraine.

An attempt to revive the Union in the form of the Byzantine-Slavic rite (which in historiography is also called “Byzantine,” “Slavic,” “Neo-Uniate,” “Neo-Slavic,” and “Neo-Byzantine”) was made in Western Belarus (65). A distinctive feature of this path, according to the historian, was that the Eastern rite was understood not as the rite of the Orthodox Church, but as one of the Catholic rites that the Catholic Church offered to Orthodox believers “from itself” (65).

According to A. Svirid, at the beginning the project was oriented toward the rapid spread of this rite across the territory of the former Russian Empire, understood as a single whole, while Western Belarus and Ukraine became “experimental fields for a new unifying policy.” The legal peculiarity of the Church of the Byzantine-Slavic rite was the subordination of its parishes to Roman Catholic bishops.

The Brest researcher mentions other projects for the revival of the Uniate Church: the signing of a new union with the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, the introduction of biritualism (when two communities, of the Roman and Byzantine rites, could be served by one priest). For various reasons, these projects were not implemented.

Svirid’s study of the activity of the Greek Catholic Church appears the most objective. In the second chapter, Svirid describes the spread of Greek Catholicism, and thus of the influence of the Lviv metropolitanate and its metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, into the territory of Belarus at the beginning of the twentieth century. The author recounts the history of the metropolitan’s contacts with the Belarusian intelligentsia even before the First World War, and describes his various projects for reviving the Union in the Russian Empire, such as the acquisition of an estate near Minsk and the resettlement there of Greek Catholic peasants who were to become the basis for further missionary work.

Svirid also focuses on the activity of Bishop Iosif Botsian, who during the First World War was appointed by A. Sheptytsky to the territory where the Uniate Church had been destroyed after 1839. Bishop Botsian carried out active missionary work in Western Belarus; A. Svirid notes that the local population gave him and his priests considerable support. After Western Belarus became part of the Second Polish Republic, the hostile attitude of the Polish authorities toward the Greek Catholic Church, which they considered a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism, hindered the development of the missionary activity of the Greek Catholic clergy.

After the creation of parishes of the Byzantine-Slavic rite, the Greek Catholic Church, lacking the ability to influence their development directly, supported them indirectly: Greek Catholic monastic communities were drawn into work in the Byzantine-Slavic rite, and priests and parishes were supported materially. The hierarchy of the Greek Catholic Church supported attempts by Catholics of the Byzantine-Slavic rite to leave the subordination of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and have their own bishop.

A. Svirid draws attention to the fact that Metropolitan Sheptytsky and his associates also supported the Belarusian national movement; in particular, the metropolitan financed the publication of the Belarusian Catholic newspaper Krynica.

The author examines the activity of priests of the Byzantine-Slavic rite in the chapter “The Spread of the Catholic Church of the Byzantine-Slavic Rite. Methods Used in Missionary Work. The Creation and Activity of Eastern Sections of Monastic Orders.”

Despite his declared objectivity, Aliaksandr Svirid interprets the activity of priests of the Byzantine-Slavic rite in a scandal-oriented vein and sees deception, bribery, and promises of earthly benefits in their work. Thus, the author regards the desire of priests of the Byzantine-Slavic rite not to differ in worship from the rite of the Orthodox Church merely as “appearance” (104). He considers the performance of rites free of charge or for a symbolic fee not as a manifestation of selflessness, but as one of the main methods of missionary work. A. Svirid sees an example of sacrificial and selfless service only in Father Vaclav Anoshka, noting that such conduct was not characteristic of the Neo-Uniate clergy (108).

In this, the author contradicts himself when describing the parishes of Albertin, Babrovičy, Tarakań, Zarečča, and others, where priests, monks, and nuns carried out educational and charitable work, helped talented young people, the sick, and so forth. The author devotes five lines to the charitable activity of the Neo-Uniate clergy, while he considers educational activity, for example the founding of a kindergarten and youth organizations in Albertin, to be “the cultivation of supporters among future generations” (109). Even when mentioning the activity of Father V. Anoshka, Svirid cites dubious information about “treating” believers with vodka and sweets as a method of missionary work (108).

The most interesting part of the work is the subsection “Settlements in Which Attempts Were Made to Organize Uniate Parishes.” It provides information about 70 settlements in Western Belarus and Podlasie where attempts were made to create Catholic parishes of the Byzantine-Slavic rite. The author gives greater attention to those settlements where full-fledged parishes existed (Albertin, Babrovičy, Tarakań, Alpień, Deliatyčy), but he also mentions localities where Neo-Uniate services were held only several times, or where attempts to create parishes were merely ventures by accidental individuals (for example, Dzikushki in Lida county).

As for the attitude of the Polish state toward the Church of the Byzantine-Slavic rite, the author distinguishes different periods and levels of these relations, which changed from restrained in the 1920s to negative in the 1930s. The results of A. Svirid’s deep and substantive analysis completely refute the thesis of Soviet historiography that Neo-Union was imposed by the Polish authorities for the purpose of Polonizing Belarusians and Ukrainians. The researcher concludes that the Polish authorities set themselves the goal of systematically and purposefully destroying the Catholic Church of the Byzantine-Slavic rite, but wished to present this as the natural course of events.

Aliaksandr Svirid identifies a number of reasons for the change in the state’s attitude toward Neo-Union: the extreme attachment of Poles to Catholicism of the Latin rite; the disagreement of the Polish authorities with the policy of the Apostolic See, which sought to free Neo-Union from Polish influences; the strengthening of Greek Catholic influence on the Catholic Church of the Byzantine-Slavic rite and, as a result, the strengthening within it of the national element, in which the Polish authorities saw a threat to their Polonizing policy; and the deterioration of relations between the state and the Orthodox Church.

A. Svirid’s study is sufficiently comprehensive, although the activity of Catholic parishes of the Byzantine-Slavic rite in Western Belarus requires a more objective treatment. The final sentence of the monograph appears unclear and provocative: the author states that “a religious organization [the Uniate Church] recognized by state authority as harmful may turn out to be the meaning and foundation of the inner spiritual life of a specific individual person” (193).