WASHINGTON — Archbishop Borys Gudziak, renowned for being the driving force behind making the Ukrainian Catholic University one of Ukraine’s top educational establishments, talked to the Kyiv Post about his work since becoming his church’s senior cleric in the U.S. last year and his plans for the future. While the university is thriving with 1,900 students studying in six faculties, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, or UGCC, is facing challenges.
Gudziak said that the five-million member church, like other Christian denominations, is facing a range of problems that have seen severely diminished congregations. The issues include fewer people applying to study for the priesthood, or to become nuns or monks, and a priesthood too often stressed by overwork. Gudziak was born in America of Ukrainian parents who arrived as refugees. He was away from the U.S. for three decades, spending much of that time in Ukraine building up the Catholic University. He also served as UGCC head in France and Belgium, periods he recalls fondly.
“I still remember the taste of good French wine with cheese, but fortunately today’s communications allow us to be in touch with Lviv, Kyiv, Belgium, Italy, France, the countries where I’ve lived and had close relationships, spiritual disciples and spiritual guides,” he said. “But I feel very privileged and graced to come back home to America, to the country of my birth, childhood and university years. So I feel that God has been very generous with me I’ve been given more than I’m asked to carry and my burden is light.”
Since being enthroned as archbishop last June at the UGCC Cathedral in Philadelphia, he has been investigating the state of the church in the U.S. and the problems it faces.
At his inauguration he said that he wanted to hear ideas from everyone who cares about the UGCC about the issues their church needs to tackle.
To that end he has organized meetings with various permutations of all the UGCC’s layers: top hierarchy, priests, nuns, monks, lay personnel and other faithful.
Although he is the senior cleric in America, the UGCC’s structure means he is responsible for his arch-eparchy which embraces Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, New Jersey and Washington D.C. while three other “suffragan” bishops belonging to his Metropoliate administer authority for the rest of America’s Ukrainian Catholic parishes.
Gudziak sees his role as coordinating activity but with each bishop having a full mandate to lead and govern in his eparchy. “I can’t and wouldn’t want to tell the bishops what to do. I cannot govern in the other eparchies,” he said. “But we meet as brothers.”
Gudziak said the head of the UGCC, His Beatitude Svyatolsav Shevchuk, has charged a number of bishops with advising him about plans to reform the church and a pastoral plan for the next five years or decade.
Gudziak spoke to the Kyiv Post in February at the UGCC seminary in Washington, D.C. He said that all Christian churches, including the UGCC, were facing a difficult struggle in the modern world and made the startling statement: “It’s very clear that Christendom is over.”
By that, he explained, it was not that the Christian faith was finished but that the religion’s pre-eminent position in much of the world had rapidly declined.
“I think we need to realize that we’re not going to be a church of great numbers as it was in medieval and early modern times when whole countries and civilizations were characterized by a Christian system.
“That culture which was basically shaped by the Christian narrative and Christian virtues and values and has changed immensely,“ he said. “Today most young people cannot tell you who Moses was or who Joseph and Mary were.”
He said that Christians likely need to return to first principles and that Christianity might even have been at its best when Christians did not have churches in buildings but organized prayers in secret in “catacombs” to avoid persecution.
Gudziak pointed to the fact that, for much of the 20th century, the UGCC in the Soviet Union was prohibited and harshly persecuted but survived operating underground.
He suggested that the UGCC had perhaps derived strength and confidence in those dark days that might be absent today.
“I think that we too quickly abandoned some of the wisdom of 20th-century catacomb life, which was a life of network, not vertical top-down church administration. There were little cells, intimate groups of people who trusted each other despite the fact that there was great danger all around them and who were willing to give their lives for the Gospel.”
One of the subjects that Gudziak considers as central to the consultations he initiated is consideration of the traumas experienced by the Ukrainian nation in the 20th century and how that continues to affect its current population and those who have emigrated to the U.S. and elsewhere.
Prominent among those traumas are brutal persecution under communism including Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s deliberate starvation of at least four million Ukrainians during the 1932-33 Holodomor and the horrors of World War II which claimed millions more lives.
“Between 1932 and 1945,” he said, “Ukraine was the most dangerous place on Earth and some 12 to 15 million people died there.”
The effects of those traumas, he said, had lingered and shaped independent Ukraine. “It is a trans-generational trauma which has influenced the development of Ukrainians. ……The trauma of what happened in those years still dwells within the generations of Ukrainians that has followed…… The fear was driven into the collective DNA.”
“You put on a facade, you wear a mask, you build a wall and your whole life and all of your interactions are filtered by these barriers which protect you from the dangerous ‘other’.”
He believes that has contributed to a system where deception and corruption have thrived, producing many “sly, cunning and unprincipled” politicians and businesspeople.
He said the “profound distrust” thus generated makes cooperation difficult and undermines long-term planning, essential for building a strong economy and a country guided by decency.
He believes the UGCC and Christian Church have a vital role to play in restoring trust that had been eroded in society – a task likely to require a lot more time, he said, than he envisaged when he moved to Ukraine 30 years ago.
“It turns out that the retransformations of the human heart, the human reflex, take a long time. What was killed by violence, by the bullet, by the knife, by the concentration camp can only really be nurtured back to full life by love and Christian witnessing [faith].”
He listed some of the issues identified by the consultations. Those included the declining number of Ukrainian Catholic priests in America who had to bear ever-growing responsibilities often in parts of the country suffering economic hardships that caused unemployment and shifts in the population as people moved in search of work.
The workload and pressures had resulted in poor physical health, depression, loneliness and alcohol problems among some priests, he said.
Many parishioners are third or fourth generation Ukrainian-Americans who don’t understand the Ukrainian language, while, said Gudziak, new emigrants from Ukraine may not speak English well. Thus, he said, priests need to be bilingual but that is not always the case.
Morale has also been affected by the great publicity given to pedophile scandals within the Catholic Church.
Gudziak said that from a peak in the revival of the UGCC in the mid-1990s which saw four candidates applying for each opening at a seminary, today not every place is being filled.
But he draws heart from the UGCC’s resilience and that it counts more than five million members. “In 1900 we were three dioceses in Ukraine with three bishops,” he said.
“Today there are 35 eparchies and exarchates and 52 bishops. In the middle of that 120 years so much effort was made to destroy us completely.”
Gudziak said the UGCC emerged with great moral authority after Ukrainian independence because it had not compromised with communist totalitarian powers.
That moral authority, he said, was again on display during Ukraine’s pro-democracy EuroMaidan Revolution which ended Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency in 2014.
The UGCC, he said, had addressed disparate aspects of society including national identity, ecology, euthanasia, abortion, motherhood, the dignity of women and had spoken out against extreme nationalism or antisemitism.
Gudziak is proud that “the church was in the trenches and front lines in Donetsk and trying to serve people in Crimea; was with the poor, organizing aid to orphans and wounded people from the war, offering solace and shelter to the displaced.”
He believes that moral authority lends relevance to the UGCC and equips it to play an important role in Ukraine and other places where it operates.
When the Kyiv Post interviewed Gudziak, he was in Washington for a week-long meeting with seven bishops from the U.S., Canada and Latin America for one of the series of meetings he has been holding since his inauguration.
As part of the exploration of trauma in Ukraine’s history, the bishops visited the Holocaust Museum and African-American Museum in Washington.
Gudziak said the series of consultations will end in June, although the coronavirus pandemic may alter the timetable. Then the ideas and proposals gathered will be distilled into a plan for the future.
One idea that has caught his imagination is that the involvement of different strata of the UGCC in formulating its future should continue in a more lasting form.
One way of doing that, said Gudziak, who is president of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, might be to establish a permanent home, perhaps in Washington D.C., for research, study and discussions about the church along the lines of the university’s Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Center.
The information and resource center with a library, lecture, exhibition and conference halls, accessible to the wider public, has already made its mark in Ukraine as an important forum for exploring cultural and scientific themes as well as religious issues.
The day after the interview, Gudziak left for a five-week trip to Europe where he was to consult with, among others, the head of the UGCC and with Pope Francis.
