Archbishop Shevchuk's Message to Putin

When we first met in April 2011, what initially impressed me about Sviatoslav Shevchuk was his almost preternatural calm: which was striking, in that, less than a month before and still a few weeks shy of his 41st birthday, Shevchuk had been elected Major-Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Byzantine in liturgy and governance while in full communion with the Bishop of Rome.

Shevchuk had been snatched out of Buenos Aires, where he was bishop to the Ukrainian diaspora there (and a friend of the city’s Latin-rite archbishop, Jorge Mario Bergoglio), and thrust into the position previously filled by some of the most formidable figures in modern Catholic history: Andrey Sheptytsky, the Ukrainian Catholic leader who did more than perhaps anyone else to shape Ukrainian cultural self-awareness in the first four decades of the 20th century; Josyf Slipyj, Sheptytsky’s successor and the model for the “pope from the steppes” in The Shoes of the Fisherman, who spent more than a decade in Gulag camps; Lubomyr Husar, who became the most widely respected figure in independent Ukraine after the Soviet crack-up in 1991. In 2011, when we had a wide-ranging conversation in Rome, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk might have looked forward to three and a half decades of work building his Church in Ukraine and strengthening the links between the motherland and Ukrainian emigres around the world. (He might also have expected, not unreasonably, to become the youngest cardinal in a century.)