A Ukrainian Priest’s Divisive Politics: At What Religious Cost?

In Lviv, Ukraine, Rev. Addriy, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church rather than the Ukrainian

affiliate of the Russian Orthodox Church, said after a Mass in June 2014 that the European Union is an

“empire of evil” defying the Word of God and spreading sins including homosexuality and pedophilia.

The priest went on to characterize the Ukrainians who toppled President Viktor Yanukovych as “Godless

deviants” and “fools . . . in the pay of hostile foreign powers.”1 Being in the western part of the state, the

eastern-looking priest was not exactly “preaching to the choir”—meaning he must have known that his

message would not be well-received by his congregation. This disjunction illustrates a distinctly religious

problem that can arise when clerics fly too far afield from the religious domain onto those of politics,

economics, or even social problems.

The problem is multi-level. On the surface, attention to non-religious matters carries with it the

opportunity cost of foregone attention to religion. To be sure, the priest spoke outside of Mass, and thus

he did not detract from it directly . However, at a deeper level, he did diminish the religious value of his

Masses. His own diminished stature or credibility in the political matter at hand put his religious role at

risk as well.

Anger at an opposing political view inexorably puts distance in a religious relationship. The latter is not

limited to new-found suspicion regarding sermons or homilies. The transcendent religious experience—

communion with God in Christian terms—involves shifting attention from the external environment (i.e.,

what is going on around you) to an “inward” orientation to a reference point that inherently transcends

the limits of cognition and perception. Feeling “safe” enough to risk shifting attention off what is going

on in the worship context (e.g., the church) is essential to being wholly invested in the experience itself

of yearning for that which is yearned for beyond the particular mask of eternity. Feeling that the person

in the room who is in charge is in any sense a threat, or even just disliking him or her, thus detracts from

the religious experience, and thus from the religion itself as an instrument thereof.

So, beyond the point that political ideology is of another domain than religion, the over-reaching can

inadvertently sabotage or at least diminish the intensity of the religious experience possible in a given

worship context. In other words, a dedicated context , sui generis to religious experience, is

compromised as soon as stuff from other domains is brought in. The inherent sensitivity of religious

experience, owing both to the intimacy in yearning for “the wholly other” that lies inherently beyond

our reach and the giving up of attention to one’s immediate surroundings (i.e., what is going on in the

church), is violated by the breaking in of stuff from our realm (e.g., politics, and even church business!).

In the case of Roman Catholicism, f or example, the “presence” of the sacrificed or consecrated Christ in

the Tabernacle on the altar sets a sanctuary apart as sacred space from the rest of the world. Whether or

not such a presence is actually in the bread in the enclosure is not the point; rather, that Catholics treat the

sanctuary as perpetually dedicated to religious activity facilitates their entering into religious experience

as in communing with God after ingesting Christ in the Eucharist. A priest or lectern making

announcements from the weekly bulletin, for example, as the congregants are intensely focused in

transcendent yearning disturbs the sensitivity of the experience itself.

Interestingly, the “pure” or rarified sensitivity that is in religious experience intentionally devoid of  

stimuli that can dilute the sensitivity itself can carry over onto ensuing experience back in a person’s daily

world of quotidian stimuli. That is the religious experience is in one sense a “sharpener” of a person’s

sensitivity, which on return to the world can “carry over.” Although the heightened sensitivity to the

 

ordinary doubtlessly fades as a person’s ordinary sensitivity level kicks back in amid its customary

context, regular “religious exercise” may give its more finely-tuned sensitivity greater staying power,

such that the “sensitivity weight-lifting” sessions may eventually not be necessary for this purpose.  

Applied interpersonally in a person’s daily life, the greater, “microscopic” sensitivity  gained through

religious experience is commonly known as compassion. In fact, this byproduct is typically misclassified

as religious rather than ethical in nature, and this error in turn can invite or provide an opening for

interlarding content from the world such as social issues (e.g. abortion, poverty, social justice) into the

worship context. In the case of Unitarian Universalism, especially when its humanist movement reached

its zenith in the 1970s in the United States, social structures based on the ideology of egalitarianism are

regarded as sacred. Such self-ideology as sacred can be interpreted in religious terms as a manifestation of

self-idolatry, which snuffs out or blocks outright transcendent spiritual or religious experience.

Therefore, sensitivity not only pertains to transcendent religious experience devoid of interfering external

stimuli, but is a byproduct known as compassion that is of value in the world. Though not religious itself,

the ethical principle of what Adam Smith calls “fellow -feeling” in his Theory of Moral Sentiments can

itself thwart the sort of invective inflicted by the Ukrainian priest on his disheartened flock. “Do not cause

your brother to stumble,” Paul advises in one of his letters to a congregation just a few decades after his

Lord’s crucifixion. If a cleric is not sufficiently careful in this regard, we can assume that he or she has

little regard for the value of others’ religious experience, and even such experience itself, relative to more

“worldly” agendas.

It is ironic, to say the least, to find religious functionaries and even institutions oblivious to what is

conducive to a religious experience that is transcendent in nature. Both in being of value in itself and forone of its byproducts, intense dedicated yearning for that which inherently lies beyond the limits of

human perception and cognition may actually receive scant attention in most religious services. Evenwhere the rites are conducive to such experience, clerics may tend to treat the ritual as an end in itselfrather than as preparatory. In how many Masses, for example, is the experience of communing with

God after the Eucharistic ritual treated as the high point, or core, of the Mass?

Instead, the priest-centric consecration of the bread and wine is said to by the pinnacle, and the Mass itselfis typically quickly ended as soon as the priest finishes washing the dishes. Unlike any experienceoriented to the external stimuli of a priest holding up the consecrated species, which admittedly can be

quite meaningful to a Catholic, the communing experience following the ritual transcends even theworshipper’s immediate environment and thus is more conducive to isolating the eternal (by transcendi ng

the external) and then sensing that of the eternal back in the person’s daily life, including in other people.This sensitivity is more finely tuned to them, and thus to the subtle indications of their suffering; and Isuppose the experience of yearning transfers over in a way in the motivation to relieve the suffering.

However, the heightened sensitivity itself may also furnish the motivation.

In terms of liturgy generally, religious ritual can be thought of as preparation, rather than as the whole ofa religious service — distinctly religious experience being the immediate objective; as the referent is both

 by definition and experientially inherently “beyond,” the intensity can be put on the yearning itself,especially if the religionist strives to transcend even the given mask of eternity to the raw numinousexperience itself. Plainly, the divisive Ukrainian priest had other treasures in mind, and therein in all

 probability were his heart and god as well.

1 Andrew Higgins, “Ukrainian Church Faces Obscure Pro- Russia Revolt in its Own Ranks,” The New York Times, June

21, 2014.