In the Current Issue: "Post-Soviet Orthodox Liturgies in Ukraine at War"
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Rites for Wounded Communities,” guest-edited by David Hogue, explores a wide range of responses in which churches and chaplains have engaged in order to help people affected by disasters and violence come to terms with the after-effects and the on-going trauma. This excerpt is from Nadieszda Kizenko, a historian who writes about the liturgical practices of conflicting factions in Ukraine, a nation traumatized by the on-going invasion and devastation wrought by Russia. This informs our understanding of the very real political implications of what we do as Christians in worship. The full essay is accessible through institutional and individual subscriptions. –– Melinda Quivik
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
. . . Before the war [in Ukraine], the OCU [Orthodox Church in Ukraine] was characterized by liturgical tolerance and experimentation. But most such changes stemmed not so much from a
desire to reform liturgy as such as from a political commitment to Ukraine as an entity distinct from Russia. Dropping the words “Russian,” dropping saints and icons associated with imperial Russia, and using Ukrainian in liturgy, were and remain means for doing this. Their overall tendency is to move away from such external forms as head-coverings for women and a less hierarchical clergy-laity relationship. To further distance from Russian practice, in 2023, they chose to adopt the modified Julian Calendar, that is, having immovable feasts be on the Gregorian calendar, but keeping the celebration of Easter with all the other Orthodox (except the Finns).
Before the war, the UOC’s [Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s] overall liturgical practice could be described as conservative. UOC clerics and hierarchs spoke Ukrainian as well as Russian, as did those in the OCU but did not see the liturgy as the primary place to display those allegiances. Until the war, they did not reject the past roles of St. Petersburg or Moscow in the evolving tradition of the Orthodox Church on their territory. And, until February 2022, they were the majority Orthodox position in Ukraine, especially in Central and Eastern Ukraine. Their liturgical conservatism was steeped less in conscious political identification than in wanting liturgy to serve as a stable, ostensibly a-political, constant. Existing political messages encoded in liturgy went unnoticed simply because they were familiar.
The Russian invasion and inflammatory sermons by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, however, have had the effect of “exposing” liturgical messages that had been taken for granted. Kirill’s claim that Donetsk wanted to secede from Ukraine and was attacked by Ukrainian forces in 2014 because of its refusal to accept gay pride parades was only the first attempt to present the war of aggression as a moral crusade. Patriarch Kirill also introduced a prayer into Russian Orthodox liturgy emphasizing the tropes of malevolent trouble-making outsiders “who desire strife” seeking to “separate and destroy the united people of Holy Rus,” thus tapping into the old narrative that the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, and the Russians are “in fact” one people, not three, and the real enemies are the West and NATO.
This and other claims—most notoriously, that Russian soldiers will be forgiven their sins if they fight in the war—has brought UOC priests and bishops to refuse to commemorate Patriarch Kirill, and to declare religious independence on May 27, 2022. Such radical moves by even the conservative UOC, and their gradual introduction of Ukrainian into liturgy, suggests that a liturgical as well as a political rethinking of Ukrainian identity is underway in every jurisdiction. . . Liturgy does not exist in a political vacuum. . .
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Nadieszda Kizenko is professor of history and Director of Religious Studies at the University at Albany and a Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her books include A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (Penn State, 2000); Good for the Souls. A History of Confession in the Russian Empire (Oxford, 2021); and (co-edited with Thomas Bremer and Alfons Brüning) Orthodoxy in Two Manifestations? The Conflict in Ukraine as Expression of a Fault Line in World Orthodoxy (Peter Lang, 2022).
Nadieszda Kizenko, “Post-Soviet Orthodox Liturgies in Ukraine at War,” Liturgy 39, no. 2 (2024): 37–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2024.2330841.