Ukraine’s Top Catholic Piles Pressure on GOP Over Russia’s Church Attacks

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is exterminating religious freedom, signaling a return by Moscow to Soviet-era levels of persecution of faiths, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has said.

Sviatoslav Shevchuk was in Washington D.C. this week with a delegation of his church’s senior figures to express gratitude for U.S. help toward Kyiv so far, in what he described as a “David versus Goliath” battle between Ukraine and Russia over two years of war.

However, in calling for further American support for Ukraine, with a funding package stalled in U.S. Congress by a wing of the Republican Party, Shevchuk said he was alarmed at the destruction of religious buildings and the arrests and killings of faith leaders. Newsweek has emailed the Kremlin for comment.

“Today, in the occupied territory, there is not one Catholic priest. All my priests, even the Roman Catholic priests, were all expelled or imprisoned,” Shevchuk told Newsweek in an interview. The church he heads has full communion with the Vatican and is the second largest particular church in the Catholic faith after the Latin Church.

“Around 50 religious ministers, Protestant pastors, Orthodox priests, Catholic priests have been imprisoned or killed,” Shevchuk said. He added that Russia is returning “to the time of the Soviet Union where all of those religion were prohibited or overcontrolled, or simply destroyed.

“In the Soviet Union, [dictator Joseph] Stalin completely destroyed our church, imprisoned all our bishops and all our priests who would not sign an agreement to become Orthodox,” added Shevchuk, who started his priestly formation at an underground seminary in the USSR.

“Even in those territories where Russia were not able to come and occupy, almost 600 churches, places of worship, synagogues were destroyed.”

The Kyiv-based Institute for Religious Freedom (IRF) said in February 2023 that, in the first 12 months of the war, the Russian military had destroyed, damaged, or looted at least 494 religious buildings, theological institutions, and sacred sites, with the figure estimated to be higher today.

“For Catholics, Orthodox Protestants, Muslim Jews, Ukraine means freedom, freedom of religion,” Shevchuk said, “where Russia has arrived, they exterminate all other religions besides the well-controlled and weaponized Russian Orthodox Church.” Its head, Patriarch Kirill, has been condemned internationally, including by figures within his church abroad, for his support of Putin’s war.

Shevchuk said that, during the war against Russian aggression, there has been cooperation among different faiths, and this has produced “a new style of ecumenical movement in Ukraine.

“We have to be a main actor in the humanitarian battle but not to fall to the same temptation the Russian Orthodox Church fell into and become an instrument of hatred.”

Shevchuk said the message he tried to convey in Washington this week was that Ukraine needs help from the U.S. “Ukrainian people are wounded but unbroken. We are tired but we are resilient. Nobody in Ukraine, even in his secret private thoughts, would ever say, ‘Let’s stop our fight. Let’s give up.'”