www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Transcarpathians send letter to Pope Benedict XVI

Decide for youself - my grandparents were "enemies of the people" - exiled from Belarus for 10 years. Great-granddad - spent 20 years in Syberia for his "nationalism" and "nazi collaboration" (he was a German translator for the civil administration in Pinsk, Belarus), his brother fought in British army (under Monte Cassino) and after 1960 decided to come back to Belarus - spent the rest of his life unemployed and spied upon. I bet a lot of similar stories happened in Carpatska Ukraine. It is easy for American born nostalgia-torn guys to express their ideas about history on the web. Go there, live for some time and see it for yourself what people feel there.

20 YEARS!! Wow I hoped he made it out alive. My great grandfather, good ole Boleslaw Glinka, was also a prisoner of Siberia for a few years after being captured by the Soviets during the Polish-Soviet war. He barely made it out alive and he hated Russians after that with a passion. Family legend says that one time my grandmother brought home a Russian and Boleslaw beat him up pretty good! Awwww the good ole days....

Oh, sorry to go off topic..

Both John Figel and I have contributed solid information about Bishop Milan's reprints of the Church-Slavonic liturgical books - which, again, indicates that the good Bishop is encouraging the liturgical use of Church Slavonic.

No one is responding to that information (which, as John Figel has pointed out, can easily be confirmed). Instead, those who see Ukrainian conspiracies under every kylym prefer to rave on. This seems to illustrate the position that says "my mind is made up; don't confuse me with the facts!"

But nothing is so relevant as facts. Please forget the cliches and start observing reality. Go to Transcarpathia, and see and hear for yourself what is happening. Or organize and raise the funds for the choir from the Greek-Catholic Cathedral in Uzhhorod to come to the USA and sing both concerts and liturgical services (it's an excellent choir, as I know from personal experience). [Caution: the choir will expect to sing the Divine Liturgy in full; the RDL is not used in the Eparchy of Mukachevo.]

A good friend who often posts on the Forum spent a couple of weeks in Transcarpathia earlier this year. So far he has not been heard from on this thread. Perhaps he would care to report his own observations.

Fr. Serge

Hmmm....been there, lived there for over a year, and have done that, please don't patronize me. I have been to the most remote villages in and around the Rusyn homeland researching first-hand the problems that the Rusyns have. I have been with my Rusyn relatives in Rokytov pri Humennom and got a first-hand account of the communist way of life. No, I wasn't born there, but when I go there, I am accepted as if I were born there.

I have also been there 8 times in the last 10 years visiting Rusyns in Slovakia, Hungary, Vojvodina, Ukraine and Poland as well as leading tour groups to the Rusyn homeland so they can experience the Rusyn way of life.

I have taken people to Ivanivci where Bishop Romzha was run off the road. We've been to the crypts under the cathedrals in Uzhorod and Presov. We've seen how the Rusyns preserved their culture and religion during communism.

I have seen and felt what the people there feel......Rusyn!

Dear Rusyn 31
By all means, I am not patronising you personally (although things you were saying does not exactly show your familiarity with the political situation in Zakarpattia), but a kind of people who believe that Uzhorod is "somewhere in Yugoslavia" and claim to be Rusyns. For obvious reasons I came to believe that you are one of them.
Believe me, I met them here, in America. And, unfortunately, those are the majority among the 3-4th generation of Zakarpatskikh Americans.
Peace.

Ihar,

No harm, no foul...

I do make it a point to research and keep-in-touch with my family, friends and contacts in the Rusyn homeland. I try to read all the newspapers and magazines and get a chance once in a while to call friends and family in the homeland.

I do admit that most of my knowledge is in Slovakia, but I try my best to keep up with the politics in all the countries where Rusyns live.

Peace.

I have no idea how we got from the liturgical use of Church-Slavonic to the annexation of Transcarpathia by the USSR in 1946.

However, the idea that Czechoslovakia had been favorable to the Ruthenians/Rusyns/Ukrainians/Carpatho-Ukrainians/Carpatho-Russians/Carpatho-Rusyns is sheer fantasy. The guarantees given to this community by Prague in exchange for the said community joining up with the Czechs and Slovaks were ignored from Day 1 (if it's any consolation, the same thing happened to the Ukrainians in Poland).

I'm no supporter of Stalin, and his nationalities policy was among the madder and more oppressive portions of his general outlook. But it requires very strange eyeglasses to get the impression that he was trying to "Ukrainianize" the place - the Soviet policy was to Russify Transcarpathia, as one could easily demonstrate with photographs and publications from the Soviet period.

Today, Slovakia is an independent country, and not doing particularly well with the minority groups which are there already. Do you serious think that adding another minority group would be in anyone's best interests?

There is, of course, Hungary. Hungary has many pleasures, but ethnic toleration is not among them. Try reading Cyril Korolevsky's chapter on the introduction of Hungarian into the Liturgy, in his delightful book Living Languages in Catholic Worship.

But better still is this quote:


Whose tanks, and where were they supposed to come from? For that matter, how were they supposed to get to Uzhhorod? The USSR was effectively out of business, and was certainly in no position to send tanks (!) across the Carpathian Mountains. Ukraine was just gaining its independence, and could not possibly have blotted its copy-book by using "tanks" to suppress a movement for local autonomy - besides which, Transcarpathia already had the status of an autonomous region, so all that was needed would have been to make that status real.

Paranoia is quite intoxicating.

Fr. Serge

As is with most of these threads, it comes back to the heritage of our Byzantine Catholic Church, that being, Rusyns.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Rusyns were ready and prepared to proclaim autonomy in Zakarpattja. They voted overwhelmingly to be an autonomous entity within Ukriane.

Unfortunately, this did not happen for they were told that if it did happen, the military would quickly intervene.

When his Grace, Bishop Milan, came to Phoenix during his recent visit to the US, I had the priviledge to serve as deacon. He celebrated the Divine Liturgy in Church-Slavonic (responses where in English). After the DL, we chatted in a common language, Spanish. I did not ask him of his plans to translate the DL into Spanish.

I am not that knowledable on this topic but perhaps the government of Ukraine is against the concept of establishing Zakarpattja as an "autonomous entity within Ukriane" because this act would set a precedent and could be used by the significant Russian minority in Eastern Ukraine to break up Ukraine as an independent sovereign nation.

For the topic of this discussion however, I think that Fr. Serge has shown that there is no attempt to replace Church Slavonic as the liturgical language.
It would be good for your church in the USA to have a closer relationship with the church in your motherland. I remember it had been suggested previously that seminarians spend some time in the seminary there. Is there any chance of that happening?
Or young people going there in the summer to a church camp?

Please state your source of reference.

Fr. Serge

Dear Orest,

Please accept my thanks!

Fr. Serge

Fr. Serge,

Text on the provincial government can be found at the below referenced sites. What the texts do not say is that when the Provincial Government was formed, Michal Turianytsia was forced to leave Ukraine and now resides in Slovakia. There is nowhere that you will find that the military would intervene. While interviewing his brother Ivan, a pediatrician at Uzhorod hospital's Department of Infectious Diseases, he stated that they were ready to intervene and squash any uprisisng and autonomous tendencies by the Rusyns.

Here are sites to read more on Rusyn history including the 1991 Provincial Government...

http://www.rusyn.org/rusyns-history.html
http://www.carpatho-rusyn.org/cra/chap5.htm
http://www.unpo.org/member_profile.php?id=44
http://www.wirnowski.com/Carp/Carpatho_Intro.html
http://www.pecina.cz/files/www.ce-review.org/00/40/pozun40.html

All these site will tell you about the provincial government formed shortly after Ukraine's independence. Here is an excerpt from Dr. Magocsi's Rusyn history,

"In December 1991, at the same time that the citizens of Ukraine voted in a referendum for their independence, 78 percent of the inhabitants of Transcarpathia voted in favor of autonomy (self-rule) for their province. To date, neither Ukraine�s government nor its parliament has implemented the promised autonomy voted on by over three-fourths of Transcarpathia�s population in a legal vote. In an attempt to put pressure on Ukraine to fulfill the results of the December 1991 referendum a �Provisional Government of the Republic of Subcarpathian Rus�� was formed in Uzhhorod in May 1993, headed by Ivan M. *Turianytsia."

I do not see any evidence that the government of Ukraine "promised" an autonomous government. The fact that a provincial government or is it a provisional government took a vote on the subject does not compel a federal government to comply.
As Orest has mentioned such a precedent for autonomy could result in the split up of the country by the Russian minority in the East. Maybe the government's move is not a direct prejudice against the Rusyns. Just my thoughts as a North American.

This thread has strayed way off-topic from the original post regarding the letter to the Pope. I strongly suggest that the posts stick with the intent of this forum which is discussing relations between the Eastern and Western Christian Churches, or the thread may face closure.

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+
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