The attack on Ukraine by Russia worries the whole world. In the Saint Volodymyr le Grand cathedral in Paris, paintings of martyrs from Eastern Europe stand alongside photos of victims of the repression of the 2014 uprising in Ukraine. And prayers are addressed to the soldiers defending “the fatherland” against Russia.
“May the Lord protect (…) those who have suffered the consequences of war”, recites a clergyman in French during the mass. “Let us pray again that God watches over all the soldiers who fulfill their duty of protection and defense of the homeland”.
“The reality of war” after the Russian invasion
The litany, intended for the military, corresponds “to the reality of war”, when “there are wounded, dead”, observes Father Ihor Rantsya, the rector of the cathedral. “During the pandemic, we prayed for hospitals and health workers. Now, we read this passage. Faith is not something abstract.
The Ukrainian reality is in fact omnipresent in the small church built in the 16th century, in a bourgeois district in the center of Paris, where sermons are given in the language of Kiev. The blue and yellow national flag flies alongside a French banner. A dove of peace is drawn on a wall.
And the faces of a hundred “heroes”, killed in 2014 by the then pro-Russian Ukrainian power during the uprising in Maidan, a central square in Kiev, seem to be looking at the altar.
A Church closer to Europe than to Russia
Founded at the end of the 10th century, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, with five million faithful, including more than 4 in Ukraine, is defined by its “pro-European” side, notes Father Ihor. Placed under the jurisdiction of Rome since 1596, it is much closer to the model of Western society than Russian, he continues.
“Each time a Russian regime, be it tsarist, communist or Putinist, seizes a part of Ukraine where (we are) installed, our Church is destroyed”, remarks Monsignor Borys Gudziak, the former bishop of Paris, now archbishop of Philadelphia (United States), questioned after the recognition by President Vladimir Putin of the independence of the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine.
Some 400,000 Ukrainian Greek Catholics were deported to Siberia after World War II, he said, when churches operating in the pro-Russian separatist territories of Donetsk and Lugansk were closed after 2014, according to Father Ihor.
“Putin is like a dictator who does anything”
“Our Church knows history and she knows its dangers”, says Bishop Borys, citing the Holodomor, the great famine orchestrated by the Soviet regime, which killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. religion and expression in Ukraine and in Europe, when the Russian regime “represses”.
Vladimir Putin is “like a dictator who didn’t listen to France, the Americans, or Europe and who does anything, just… like Hitler! “, worried Mykhailo Andrushko, a fifty-year-old with a broad build, among the thirty faithful who came to attend mass on Tuesday evening.
Oksana Kalashnik, a Ukrainian housekeeper who has lived in Paris for two years, called the Russian president a “terrorist”. “The level of stress is increasing” among the parishioners, of whom “some are approaching depression”, regrets Father Ihor, 42, who confides that he himself has trouble putting down his phone in search of information on his country. The faithful “ask us how to react, how to be in this situation as a Christian, how to love the enemies”, he says. “How can we love Putin? “.