The struggle for the national idea preservation as an element of the Greek-Catholic Church activity

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that Ukrainian nation builds its national life on the geographical and cultural crossroads of the East and the West. This very proximity of both Western and Eastern civilizations, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity is to blame for the intricacies of the church and religion processes in Ukraine. Therefore, the people’s national and cultural identity, as well as their religious traditions, were formed under the influence of both West and East. Still, as a famous Lviv dissident Ivan Gel’ puts it, it is Europe that is responsible for the biggest impact on the ethnical culture of Ukraine as the latter has always been an integral part of the former 95 . The long history of the Ukrainian Church witnessed several crucial events. They are the baptizing of the year 988, the Union of Brest in XVI century, undercover church activity and the revival of the Greek Catholic church in the second half of the XX century. The event with the greatest importance was the baptizing of the Kyivan Rus’, as the state managed to become fully Christian in the period of one-two generations lifetime. Still, there was strong evidence of Christianity present on the territory of the modern Ukraine long before baptizing, it is documented in the historical manuscripts, and it might have got to the country through the modern Transcarpathian region, which bordered on the Holy Roman Empire 96 . Various historical sources testify to the spread of Christianity in the south of present-day Ukraine as far as the II century. In the “Zhytije sviatyh” («Lives of the Saints») there are repeated mentions about the Rus’ Christians who lived in the VIII –