A new film describes the treatment of Catholic priests caught in the crossfire of the four-year-long war between Russia and Ukraine. No Priests Left is a story of deportation and torture. “Priests and pastors were arrested. They were interrogated. They were beaten. They were held in … torture chambers,” Father Oleksandr Bohomaz told Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) recently.
At the beginning of the war, Father Bohomaz was serving a parish in Melitopol, in southern Ukraine, an area currently occupied by the Russian aggressors. Today, there are “no Catholic priests left” in occupied regions.
The Threatened Ukrainian Church
On February 24, 2022, the eyes of the entire world were on Ukraine. The surprise Russian invasion dominated the news media. Few gave Ukraine much chance of survival, let alone victory. Assassination squads were rumored to be all over the country trying to eliminate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Russian military was simply too strong for the ill-trained Ukrainians to last long.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) is in full communion with Rome. It has always had a difficult history, one that echoes the nation’s unfortunate history. Divided between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia and tsarist Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, the Bolsheviks absorbed Ukraine in 1919 and made it part of the U.S.S.R. Nazi Germany occupied it from 1941 to 1944. It finally became an independent nation with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Throughout the many periods of occupation, the UGCC was primarily an underground church. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Tsarist government openly favored the schismatic Russian Orthodox Church and oppressed the UGCC. That repression caused many of its members to emigrate to the United States. Once here, they established parishes with the full blessing of the Vatican. However, in Ukraine itself, the ability to worship openly only came with independence. At the beginning of the war, over 3.6 million Ukrainians were members of the UGCC.
Putin’s Self-Serving Excuses
However, many within Russia never accepted Ukraine’s independence. Among those is a man who looked on as the Soviet empire dissolved, former KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin. He saw the world he was raised in disintegrate. That is a deeply disconcerting experience, simultaneously filling a person with a sense of both disillusionment and nostalgia.
Given those experiences and sentiments, Putin was well-positioned to be influenced by Aleksandr Dugin’s political theories. That influence was exemplified by Putin’s 2014 justification of his first incursion into Ukrainian territory, the Crimea. “Crimea has always been and remains,” Putin announced, “an inseparable part of Russia.” By 2022, his sense of historical place had become enlarged: “It [meaning all of Ukraine] is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.”
In 2022, Putin decided to complete the job of reintegrating Ukraine into Russia. The UGCC was, and remains, an obstacle. It is a deep and non-Russian influence—a sign that Ukraine was never as Russian as Putin wants to pretend that it is. Therefore, like his other opponents, the nation had to be eliminated.
Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) News relates that “In March 2024, the Russian Orthodox Church declared Russia’s war on Ukraine a ‘holy war,’ with Russia ‘protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.’” OSV added that “Patriarch Kirill, the [Russian Orthodox] church’s head, told believers in a September 2022 sermon that Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine will have ‘all sins’ washed away by their deaths.”
Persecuted Priests
Such baseless assurances must inspire the Russian commanders and troops to commit many unspeakable acts against the Ukrainians in general and the UGCC in particular.
“It is deathly dangerous to be a Ukrainian Catholic in Russian-occupied territory,” the film states. “The method is the same—the tsarist regime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Soviet regime in the twentieth, and now Putin in the twenty-first, ban our Church and basically destroy it. It has to go underground, into the catacombs.”
Even though No Priests Left is only fourteen minutes long, it is nonetheless an important film. It provides testimony that Catholics are being cruelly persecuted and opposes the myth of Russia as a defender of faith and traditional values. By exposing this campaign against Ukrainian Catholics, the film strengthens the case for Ukraine’s right to be an independent and sovereign nation.
Countering Putin’s Fallacies
Indeed, Vladimir Putin is no friend to true Christianity. His own shadowy lifestyle, routine assassination of political rivals and “rehabilitation” of Josef Stalin show where his heart truly lies. He supports the Russian Orthodox Church because he dominates its leadership.
The United States has many legitimate interests in preserving Ukraine’s independence. It is a bulwark against Russian expansionist ambitions in the Baltic states and former Eastern Bloc nations. American support for Ukraine also demonstrates to China that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in a situation with many parallels to the one in Ukraine.
Catholics around the world should find inspiration in the Ukrainians’ dogged resolve in the face of cruel persecution. Each one should pray for the grace to defend both Church and country with similar diligence, self-sacrifice and reliance on God’s grace.
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