Myroslav Marynovych is currently vice-rector of the Catholic University of Ukraine. A former atheist, he was confined in a communist labour camp for seven years and deported to Kazakhstan.

Marco Tosatti
Rome

During the long dark years of detention, imprisonment, and the gulag, something happened. Myroslav discussed it in Madrid during EncuentroMadrid, an event organized by Communion and Liberation in Spain.

“My family was religious,” he said during the meeting in the Spanish capital. “My uncle was a Greek-Catholic priest, and at home my mother created atmosphere of simple and sincere faith, without any fanaticism. She would have liked me to be a believer, but she never pressured me. But although I respected the religion, I was a sceptic and an atheist. I did not need God – I did fine without him.”

He was young when he started getting involved with dissidents, in defence of human rights against a communist system whose high moral values in theory proved to be false in practice. In Ukraine he was the founder of Helsinki Watch, a group formed to monitor the implementation of the Helsinki Accords on human rights. In 1965, European countries signed a treaty with the USSR that, in principle, allowed the free flow of ideas, including religious freedom. In 1976, with the help of Western journalists, ten Ukrainian dissidents (including Myroslav) denounced violations against the Helsinki Accords that had occurred in Ukraine. “We released the names of the poets and writers who had been arrested, and asked for their release.”

“We had no illusions – we knew we would be arrested” – as indeed happened. In 1977, he was arrested by the KGB on charges of “spreading anti-Soviet propaganda in order to weaken the stability of the system.” Out of ten dissidents, eight were jailed, and two were deported. Myroslav was sentenced to exile and twelve years in a labour camp. “But there was not one day when I regretted what I did.” He had served ten years when Gorbachev’s Perestroika arrived.

In the meantime, something extraordinary had happened. “The Kiev KGB had finished interrogating me, and I was taken back to my cell. I was pacing, agitated, reflecting on various intellectual issues. And suddenly, in that moment, I saw a flash of light – a thunderbolt. The three days that followed were very strange: I got out of bed, I ate, drank, I sat – but I was not there. I could not hear or respond to what people were saying to me. On the third day, I heard the ringing of bells, and I spoke. I asked my cellmate, ‘What is that sound? Are those the bells of the church of St. Vladimir?’ He replied, ‘Thank goodness, at least you can hear.’”

Myroslav says that at that moment, he felt as if a knot had come undone inside of him. “It was like a scroll unrolled itself, and suddenly I understood many things about the Bible, things I had known as separate facts, but now they were merged into a new vision of the cosmos. I felt that I now understood it – I saw it all together. From that day I was another person, a religious person.”

Another very special moment occurred two years later. Myroslav felt ill and weak, lying on a cot in a punishment cell. He began to despair. “Then I heard a powerful voice in Ukrainian, the language of my far-away home, which said to me: ‘Pray!’” He was so weak (following a hunger strike) he could not even use his hand to make the sign of the cross. “I crossed myself mentally. In an instant, my strength returned, and I jumped down from the camp bed in one leap.”

Myroslav is shocked by the fact that in Britain today, one cannot go to court wearing a cross around one’s neck. “In prison, where we were not allowed to wear crosses around our necks, I thought of the West as a place of tolerance. Now religion is almost persecuted, and an irreligious view of the cosmos is winning a monopoly over society – a monopoly that is just as damaging as the previous one.”

Vatican Insider

Fr. Borys Gudziak, the rector at Ukrainian Catholic University, recently visited Toronto as part of a six-week tour of Canada, the United States and some European countries. – courtesy of Ukrainian Catholic University

Canadians’ support for the only Catholic university in the former Soviet Union — which was recently backed up by a $1.2 million donation from businessman James Temerty — sends a strong message that promotes democracy and religious freedom in Ukraine, said Fr. Borys Gudziak.

“After the Orange Revolution hit, we had very high hopes for fully democratic prospects of an independent Ukraine,” the rector at Ukrainian Catholic University told The Catholic Register while in Toronto as part of a six-week tour of Canada, the United States and some European countries.

“We have (since) turned towards authoritarianism and some politically motivated trials.”

That authoritarianism can be seen at the university itself. The university is under the watchful eye of Ukraine’s secret police, said Gudziak.

Last year, he received a call on his private cellphone from an agent of  the Security Service of Ukraine. The agent sought Gudziak’s co-operation in “spying on student activists and to rat out the names of student protest organizers,” said Borys Wrzenewskj, a former Ontario MPP. Gudziak’s phone has also been tapped.

“Not since the days of the Soviet Union has the Ukrainian Catholic Church, its institutions, priests and students been menaced in this way,” Wrzenewskj said.

Gudziak explained that “fear, inculcated by decades of persecution, is now coming back (in Ukraine).” He said youth are afraid to write in blogs for fear that they might be monitored or their parents harassed.

On the monitoring of the university, Gudziak said the secret police “have continued on a regular basis to call some of the faculty and inquire about international conferences, who is doing what, staying where.” Despite the monitoring, Gudziak said the university continues to be one of two universities in Ukraine to have “consistently spoken out on poignant social and political issues of the day.”

Gudziak said the key to facing this challenge is “to overcome the fear and be yourself, not to step back from it.”

“That is needed to change post-Soviet society,” he said. “Our faith as a Ukrainian Catholic university is really a source of our strength (during) that struggle.”

Supporting the university, he said, “gives many people cause for hope.”

“I hope our university is a place where people would follow the martyrs of the 20th century who can overcome authoritarianism,” he said.

The Ukrainian Catholic University opened in 1994. Its annual operating budget is $2.5 million. This year, two university residences are set for construction. Jean Vanier’s L’Arche community has been invited to live in one of the residences.

“We’re trying to reconsider what a university is or can be in the 21st century,” he said.

Temerty’s donation will fund three endowed professorships to promote Ukrainian-Jewish interfaith relations at the Ukrainian Catholic University, which is based in Lviv, western Ukraine.

In addition to this donation, the family of Wrzesnewskyj donated $100,000. Last year, Wrzenewskyj spoke up at Queen’s Park against state-sanctioned attempts to muzzle Ukraine’s media and opposition leaders, and also condemned the “intimidation” of Gudziak.

http://www.catholicregister.org/features/item/13375-ukraines-catholic-university-victim-of-old-soviet-ways