The Three Kyivan Churches of Ukraine and the Three Romes

Abstract

Each year, the Research Program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) sponsors the Bohdan Bociurkiw Memorial Lecture. These lectures honour the memory of Professor Bohdan Bociurkiw, one of the founders of the CIUS and an eminent political scientist and internationally-renowned specialist in human rights, Soviet religious policy, and the history of the Ukrainian churches. They bring to Edmonton prominent scholars to speak on research at the intersection of Professor Bociurkiw’s interests in politics, religion, and history in Ukraine. The article below constitutes an expanded version of the 2021 Bohdan Bociurkiw Memorial Lecture, given by Professor José Casanova of Georgetown University. Professor Casanova is one of the world's top scholars in the sociology of religion and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (U of Chicago P, 1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into several languages. Since the 1990s, Professor Casanova has been a close observer of the evolution of civil society, nationalism, and religious pluralism in Ukraine. Indeed, in 2017, he published Beyond Secularization: Religious and Secular Dynamics in Our Global Age in Ukrainian. On 5 January 2019, Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople signed a tomos, or decree, that officially recognized and established the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and granted it self-government, or autocephaly. This act formalized a major rift in Orthodox Christianity, as the Moscow Patriarchate, which claims canonical jurisdiction in Ukraine, then broke off relations with Constantinople. The hope that the new church would heal the rifts in Ukrainian Orthodoxy, bringing together the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate), Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church into one, was not immediately realized. Moreover, in addition to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, too, claims the mantle of the Kyivan religious tradition. In his lecture, Professor Casanova brings his sociologist’s eye to the question of the competition of three different national churches in present-day Ukraine and the