‘Truth and Justice’ Return to Ukraine, Cardinal Says

LVOV, Soviet Union —  Climaxing a week of religious and national renewal in the Ukraine, returning Catholic Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky on Sunday conducted a Byzantine Mass in a Lvov cathedral for the first time in half a century.

Inside the freshly gilded, exuberantly baroque Cathedral of St. George, the seat of his church, Lubachivsky raised his voice in triumph through the prayers and incense.

“Today, truth and justice have returned to the Ukraine based on forgiveness and love,” proclaimed Lubachivsky, who returned Saturday to the homeland he left in 1938. “Today, that which until recently seemed impossible has happened. . . . As father and head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, I take possession and solemnly enter into our Cathedral of St. George for the memory of all ages.”

From 1946 until last year, the Catholic religion was officially proscribed. Under a crackdown dating to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, its clergy were often jailed, its property confiscated and its followers harassed into practicing their faith secretly. It is the dominant religion of Lvov and adjoining areas of the western Ukraine.

On Sunday, the crowd overflowed outside the ocher-walled church during the Mass for Palm Sunday, which Ukrainian Catholics celebrate according to the Julian calendar, a week later than many other Christians.

One of the those in the crowd was a 60-year-old man, with hands tough as steam shovels, who held a credential identifying him as a former political prisoner. He did not give his name.

All sinew and memory, in an ill-fitting suit, he heard the Mass without really hearing.

“They took us in ’47 to a prison camp in the East,” he said. “The guards had furs, and we were half-naked. They laughed at us and said, ‘Catholics! We have forced you out of Soviet history.’ I never thought I would live to see this day.”

Lubachivsky’s three-hour Mass took possession of a cathedral he had not seen in 52 years. It was the highlight of week of religious rebirth in the Ukraine that Pope John Paul II ascribed Sunday in a message from Rome to “the unfathomable workings of Divine Providence.”

The 76-year-old Lubachivsky, who spent more than 30 years of his exile in the United States, had conferred closely with the Pope before returning Saturday from his exile headquarters in Rome.

He returned to a homeland turned topsy-turvy.

A few years ago, it would have been rash to advertise the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag that snapped from atop every public building in Lvov on Sunday.

Two years ago, a Catholic priest was sentenced to six months in the Soviet army for saying a public Mass.

Last year, Ukrainian Catholics and faithful of the Moscow-obedient Russian Orthodox Church, the largest religion among the 50 million Ukrainians, dueled angrily for control of the Cathedral of St. George.

They held competing Masses on the steps of the church, which was confiscated from the Catholics when they were proscribed in 1946 and passed to Orthodox control.

The Catholics got their cathedral back last summer with the help of the Lvov region’s elected pro-independence government.

Addressing a festive crowd of tens of thousands before the Opera House in the gabled and graceful heart of Lvov’s old city on Sunday, Lubachivsky invoked all of his patriarchal powers to declare “invalid and uncanonical” the Catholic suppression.

He denounced the May, 1946, meeting that authorized it as “a gathering of the unjust which passed a death sentence on our native church . . . and violated fundamental human rights.”

As it emerges from the catacombs, Lubachivsky’s church counts about 5 million faithful and 1,000 priests who survived unflagging official repression.

“We would go to Mass in Orthodox churches and pretend they were still ours,” said one worshiper standing proudly in the overflow crowd outside the cathedral in his robin-blue uniform of a World War I Ukrainian rifle regiment.

“We would gather for a liturgy, perhaps 20 trusted people in what we called a house of God, though it was just someone’s apartment,” said one of the rifleman’s friends.

Re-establishing a civil discourse with the Orthodox Church will be one of the cardinal’s first chores at a time of a great awakening in the Ukraine that is even more political than religious.

Back in the crowd, the gnarled 60-year-old former political prisoner saw a potentially dangerous but certain future emerging from the unstopping convergence of a renascent religion and historic nationalism.

“This time, we will lie down in front of the tanks if necessary, but we will not surrender,” he said.