Man With A Mission

Not everyone in Ukraine was thrilled by their holy visitor this week. "Couldn't care less," grunted young Mykolo, selling small aluminum icons at the newly resurrected St. Michael's monastery in the center of Kiev. "I know he's not our divine leader, and that's all I need to know."

Mykolo was hardly alone. Last week 3,000 protestors, who like Mykolo adhere to the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, took their displeasure to the streets. One Orthodox protestor even marched through Kiev with a banner pronouncing John Paul II "the forerunner of the anti-Christ." So it was hardly surprisingly that on the first day of his five-day visit to Ukraine, as the Pope was driven through Kiev in the glassed-in Popemobile, the police and plainclothes security men on the streets—some 20,000 in all—far outnumbered the faithful. The xenophobia of the Orthodox Church conspired with a chill rain to keep even the curious at home.

When it comes to religion Ukraine has a long—and deeply tangled—tradition. Of the country's 49 million residents, some 10 million are Orthodox Christians. Only 6 million are Catholic—and 5 million of them are followers of the so-called Ukrainian Greek Catholic church. (Although loyal to the Vatican, Ukrainian Greek Catholics worship in the eastern rite retained by the Greek Orthodox church after the Great Schism of 1054.)

Things did not get any better for the Pope when it came to the services. Sunday's Latin mass at a sporting airfield outside Kiev drew only 100,000. Church officials, however, told reporters not to worry. Monday's Byzantine-Ukrainian liturgy at the same venue, they assured doubters, would bring out the local faithful. The Pope's second outdoor mass in Kiev, however, attracted only 30,000-40,000.

It was only when the Pope touched down in Lviv early Monday evening that he got the passionate reception he had expected. Lviv is the capital of Galicia, the western Ukrainian lands held by the Austro-Hungarian empire until it’s collapse in 1918. Lviv and the surrounding countryside then came under Polish rule until 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact turned them over to the Soviets. The Nazis, however, occupied the city, and it was only in 1945 that Soviet troops marched in to stay—until the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1989. But Lviv remains more a part of Mitteleuropa than the post-Soviet world. This corner of Ukraine remains largely, and fervently, Catholic.

In Lviv, the Popemobile traveled along narrow cobblestone streets packed with the radiant faithful (The stones on many of the central streets had been relaid by hand in the spring to smooth the Pope's way.) Only 800,000 people live in Lviv, but at the mass at the local hippodrome on the edge of town the crowds, at last, were overflowing—to an estimated 1.2 million. "People have come from all over Ukraine," said Stepan Kupril, editor of the local paper, Vysoky Zamok. "And of course, there are the Poles." Buses bearing pilgrims from nearby Poland lined the outside of the city. Young pilgrims who had biked to Lviv from the surrounding countryside filled the city center. While army units swept the streets for mines, the cadets lining the Pope's route held small Pope portraits and cameras.

Popes, say the Vatican experts, think in terms of millennia, not decades, and this Polish Pope, even at 81 and in frail health, dreams of reconciling Orthodoxy with Catholicism. Controversially, the Pope would also like to visit Russia. Aleksei II, the head of the Russian Orthodox church, however, has not let up in his fierce determination to keep Russia off any Papal itinerary. The Moscow Patriarchy has long argued that the Vatican is out to steal souls. With the Pope in Ukraine, Aleksei made sure to score his own public relations counter-attack by traveling to the Poland-Belarus border on Sunday. In Brest, the Russian Patriarch sternly told the TV crews that "outside forces" were out to "destroy the unity" of the Orthodox Slavic world. On the Pope's trip to Ukraine, Aleksei kept to his line: "This visit will produce no peace, no stabilization, no improvement in relations between different confessions in Ukraine."

Still, one could find a few Russian Orthodox priests brave enough to come to Lviv, a city where anti-Russian chauvinism runs high even without a Pope in town (Lviv boasts a "Djokhar Dudaev Street", named after the late rebel leader of the Chechen Independence Movement, and a temporary ban—it was lifted—on Russian pop music in public places.) These Russian Orthodox priests came to Lviv on their own money, risking a backlash at home. "We feel a special mission to be here," said Father Innokenty, who teaches at a theological college in Moscow. "Of course it's better for our faith to be represented at a Papal visit than to observe some foolish boycott set by the Church hierarchy."

The Pope for his part has tried to hit all his most humble and forgiving notes. He visited Babi Yar—the memorial marking the site where as many as 200,000 Jews and other victims of Nazis are buried, 33,000 of whom were machine-gunned into mass graves in a 3 day massacre. And during a mass in Kiev, he asked Ukraine's Orthodox for forgiveness for Catholic "errors." "I have not come here with the intention to proselytize," John Paul implored, "but as a witness for Christ, together with all the Christians of the whole church and ecclesiastical community." All the same, few in Moscow were welcoming his words. Given the strength of the Moscow Patriarchy's opposition, a Papal visit to Russia would seem impossible, at least with this Patriarch and this Pope.