Russian Greek Catholic Church
The Russian Greek Catholic Church or Russian Byzantine Catholic Church is a sui iuris Byzantine Rite Eastern Catholic particular church that is part of the worldwide Catholic Church. Historically, it represents both a movement away from the control of the Church by the State and towards the reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Catholic Church. It is in full communion with and subject to the authority of the Pope in Rome as defined by Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches.
Russian Catholics historically had their own episcopal hierarchy in the Russian Catholic Apostolic Exarchate of Russia and the Russian Catholic Apostolic Exarchate of Harbin, China. In 1907, Pope Pius X appointed Ukrainian Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, the Archbishop of Lviv, to be responsible for supporting Russian Catholics due to the precarious position of their Church within Russia. He continued in this role through World War II. Leonid Feodorov was the first Exarch of Russia, and was imprisoned and exiled by the Soviets for over a decade before dying in 1935. In 1939 Sheptytsky appointed his brother Klymentiy Sheptytsky as Exarch, and he died in a Soviet prison in 1951. Since the 1950s both Russian Catholic exarchates have been vacant, though they are listed as extant in the Annuario Pontificio.
In 1928, Pope Pius XI founded the Collegium Russicum, whose graduates have included Walter Ciszek, Pietro Leoni, and Theodore Romzha, as a major seminary to train their clergy. A Latin Church bishop, Bishop Joseph Werth, is currently the ordinary for Byzantine Catholics in Russia.
, there were around 3,000 members of the church. An exarchate was established in 1917, and Soviet repression meant that Eastern Catholics went underground. Their outstanding figure, Mother Catherine Abrikosova, was subjected to a Stalinist-era show trial and spent more than 10 years in solitary confinement before her death in 1936. The position of Eastern Catholics in Russia – as opposed to that of Poles or Lithuanians in the Latin Church – is still tenuous, with little organisation in place. Their existence remains a flashpoint in Rome's relations with the Russian Orthodox, who are intensely suspicious of Catholic activity in Russia.
Background
According to Fr. Christopher Lawrence Zugger, the conversion of Kievan Rus in 988 at the orders of the Grand Prince of Kiev St. Vladimir the Great was an entry into a still unified Christendom. It was only over the centuries following the Great Schism in 1054 that anti-Papal and anti-Catholic beliefs grew as a result of the Church in Rus strengthening its alliance with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. In 1441, however, Grand Prince Vasily II of Moscow embraced Caesaropapism by ordering the imprisonment of Isidore of Kiev, the Metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus', for attempting to implement the reunion decrees of the Council of Florence, and his replacement by Metropolitan Jonah. It was only then that the Church in Rus' became definitively schismatic and non-Catholic. The schism was further cemented in 1588, when the Metropolitan See of Moscow was raised to a patriarchate by the Ecumenical Patriarch. By this time, the separation had become so complete that both churches accused each other of being heretics.Out of all Eastern Orthodox Churches, what Max Weber was later to dub Caesaropapism reached its greatest extreme in the Tsardom of Russia, beginning when Ivan IV the Terrible assumed the title Czar in 1547 and gutted the independence of the Russian Orthodox Church from control by the State.
During a speech at the St. Procopius Unionistic Congress in 1959, Fr. John Dvornik explained, "...the attitude of all Orthodox Churches toward the State, especially the Russian Church is dictated by a very old tradition which has its roots in early Christian political philosophy... the Christian Emperor was regarded as the representative of God in the Christian commonwealth, whose duty was to watch not only over the material, but also the spiritual welfare of his Christian subjects. Because of that, his interference in Church affairs was regarded as his duty." This is not so say, however, that State control over the Russian Orthodox Church was always accepted without criticism or opposition.
In defiance of the Tsar's absolute power, St. Philip, the former Starets and Hegumen of the Solovetsky Monastery, located above the Arctic Circle, and Metropolitan bishop of Moscow, preached sermons in Tsar Ivan the Terrible's presence that condemned the indiscriminate use of state terror against real and imagined traitors and their entire families by the Oprichnina. Metropolitan Philip also withheld the traditional blessing from the Tsar during the Divine Liturgy. In response, the Tsar convened a Church Council, whose bishops obediently declared Metropolitan Philip deposed on false charges of moral offenses and imprisoned him in a monastery. When the former Metropolitan refused a request from the Tsar to bless his plans for the 1570 Massacre of Novgorod, Tsar Ivan allegedly sent Malyuta Skuratov to smother the former Bishop inside his cell. Metropolitan Philip was canonized in 1636 and is still commemorated within the Orthodox Church as a, "pillar of orthodoxy, fighter for the truth, shepherd who laid down his life for his flock." Within the Russian Greek Catholic Church, Blessed Leonid Feodorov, the 20th century Exarch of Russia, is known to have had a very deep devotion to Metropolitan St. Philip of Moscow.
Over the centuries that followed, as growing numbers of members of the Eastern Catholic Churches fell under the rule of the House of Romanov as a result of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Great Northern War, and the Partitions of Poland, they similarly experienced escalating and brutal religious persecution.
For example, Tsar Peter the Great, whose anti-Catholicism and control over the Russian Church had already caused the martyrdom of Greek Catholic Deacon Peter Artemiev at Solovetsky Monastery on March 30, 1700, was so enraged on 11 July 1705 to see icons of Eastern Catholic Starets, bishop, and martyr St. Josaphat Kuntsevych inside the Basilian monastery church in Polotsk, that the Tsar immediately desecrated the Eucharist and then personally murdered several priests who attempted to retrieve it.
In 1721, the same Tsar and Theophan Prokopovich, as part of their Church reforms, replaced the Patriarch of Moscow with a department of the civil service headed by an Ober-Procurator and called the Most Holy Synod, which oversaw the appointment and deposition of the Church Hierarchy, as a further extension of the Tsar's Government.
Meanwhile, with the grudging exception of the Armenian Catholic Church, the Eastern Catholic Churches were increasingly treated as illegal in the Russian Empire beginning with the forced conversion of the Archeparchy of Polotsk-Vitebsk by Bishop Joseph Semashko between 1837 and 1839 and continuing with the 1874–1875 Conversion of Chelm Eparchy and the martyrdom of 13 unarmed men and boys by the Imperial Russian Army in the village of Pratulin, near Biała Podlaska on January 24, 1874.
It was almost certainly with these events in mind that Leonid Feodorov, the future Greek Catholic Exarch of Russia and Belarus, predicted at Anagni to a fellow Catholic seminarian more than a decade before the fall of the House of Romanov, "Russia will not repent without travelling the Red Sea of the blood of her martyrs and numerous sufferings of her apostles."
Intellectual precursors
The modern Russian Catholic Church owes much to the inspiration of poet and philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Inspired by the writings of Fr. Ivan Gagarin, who had sought to win over the Russian Orthodox Church to reunification with the Holy See without abandoning either the Byzantine Rite or the traditional Church Slavonic liturgical language and the Divine Liturgy, Solovyov argued that, just as the world needed the Tsar as a universal monarch, the Church needed the Pope of Rome as a universal ecclesiastical hierarch. Solovyov further argued, however, that the Russian Orthodox Church, "is only separated from Rome de facto, so that one can profess the totality of Catholic doctrine while continuing to belong to the Russian Orthodox Church."On August 9, 1894, a Russian Orthodox priest and protegé of Solovyov, Fr. Nicholas Tolstoy, entered into full communion with the Holy See by making profession of faith before Bishop Félix Julien Xavier Jourdain de la Passardière at the Church of St. Louis des Français in Moscow. Under oath, Fr. Nicholas renounced all contrary to Catholic doctrine and accepted both the Council of Florence and the First Vatican Council. At Fr. Nicholas's request, all documents relating to his conversion were conveyed to Pope Leo XIII, who kept them along with a personal archive of papers having, "to do with matters in which the Pope was particularly interested."
The person most responsible for the creation of the Russian Greek Catholic Church, however, was Metropolitan bishop Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. According to his biographer Fr. Cyril Korolevsky, Sheptytsky's lifelong obsession with reuniting the Russian people with the Holy See goes back at least to his first trip there in 1887. Afterwards, Sheptytsky "wrote some reflections" between October and November of 1887, and expressed his belief, "that the Great Schism, which became definitive in Russia in the fifteenth century, was a bad tree, and it was useless to keep cutting the branches without uprooting the trunk itself, because the branches would always grow back."
Following his elevation to Metropolitan bishop of Lviv and Halych at the insistence of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1901, Metropolitan Andrey's interest in the Russian people continued. Posing as a Ukrainian lawyer on a pleasure trip, he made a secret visit to the Russian Empire in 1907, which he used as a cover for meeting and attempting to convert senior Russian Orthodox and Old Believer clergy.