Religion, Nation, and Secularization in Ukraine ed. by Martin Schulze Wessel and Frank E. Sysyn (review)

Proceeding from a 2010 international conference held in Munich under the same title, this book covers a range of topics on the history of religious culture in Ukraine, its interaction with national identity, and its encounters with secularizing trends in three episodes from the Union of Brest (1595–96) to the 1930s.

The first two papers treat religious and national cross-fertilization between Poland and Ukraine. Kerstin Jobst’s brilliant study analyzes the veneration of St. Josaphat Kuntsevych, the murdered champion of the Union of Brest, whose cult is a transnational phenomenon shared by Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Polish Roman Catholics. Burkhard Wöller compares Polish and Ukrainian historiographies of the Union of Brest. Rather than a conflict between two monolithic lines of interpretation, Wöller demonstrates that each side had its own internal diversity as it assessed the religious, political, and geo-cultural dimensions of the Unia.

The next group of papers considers the role of clergy and religious functionaries in modernization and in forging relations between their religious communities and the secular world. Michael Moser outlines the creation of the Modern Standard Ukrainian language and argues that the role of nineteenth-century Galician Greek Catholic clerics was no less important than that of Ukrainian laity in the Russian empire. Tobias Grill offers a fascinating exploration of how rabbis in nineteenth-century Ukraine contributed to the modernization and secularization of Judaism in religious life, education, philanthropy, and politics. Frank Sysyn gives a portrait of priest Mykhailo Zubrytsky and considers his role in the transformation of religious identity into national identity among the Greek Catholics of Galicia.

The final section covers conflict, controversy, and contrasts in the first half of the twentieth century and in various settings, from the Ukrainian village to the international context. Liliana Hentosz studies Vatican policy on the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918–19 and its efforts to balance justice and equal rights for all nations in a conflict where Catholics took up arms against each another. Oleh Pavlyshyn focuses on the calendar reform controversy as it affected Ukrainian Greek Catholic relations with other denominations and their sense of identity between Polish Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy. He extends his survey to the end of the twentieth century with a fascinating overview of the issue in the diaspora.

Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak draws on archival sources to study conflicts between Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops and their politicized clergy and faithful. In fact, hot-button issues like clerical celibacy, Latinization, and support for Ukrainian patriotism were so divisive that even bishops found themselves on opposite sides. Bohachevsky-Chomiak’s insight, that the church and its laity suffered from an inability to understand their disagreements, uncovers an Achilles’ heel that would continue to plague the church in later years. Leonid Heretz’s oral history project on the Boiko region in the interwar period provides rich sources on the introduction of secular ideas and values into the traditional Ukrainian village. Through the prism of a reconstructed semantic dichotomy (“enlightened/ignorant”), Heretz sheds light on striking contrasts between generations, secular/religious outlooks, and official/popular beliefs and practices.

This deceptively slim, yet very rich, collection provides accessible, informative, and cutting-edge historical research on a neglected area of East European studies. It will be of interest to students and specialists of Eastern Europe who wish to know more about Ukraine’s diverse religious history, both on the homefront and in its contacts and interactions with Poland, Austria, and Russia.