Continuities and Ruptures of a Religious Tradition: Making ‘Orthodoxy’ in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

In this chapter I engage with the institutionalization of the post-1989 Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), in connection with the postsocialist transformations that shaped the ‘making of churches’ in (western) Ukraine. I focus on a particular ‘community of practice’, the traditionalist movement in the UGCC, which retains a nostalgia for the church’s underground times. Marginalized by the church, this group has looked for alternative spaces in which religious practice might preserve the mode of religiosity specific to the underground period. Their story illustrates the attempt of a religious institution emerging in the postsocialist religious sphere to consolidate its structure by redefining the orthodoxy of the local religious tradition. Historically, two great religious traditions, Eastern and Western Christianity, intersected in western Ukraine and equally shaped the local tradition. To describe the specific Ukrainian religious tradition, some authors portrayed it as a ‘religion of the margins’(une religion des confins), a space of ambiguity in between the Latin Catholic and the Slavic Orthodox worlds (Wilson 2000; Boyko 2004). Within this tradition, Greek Catholics stand apart as a perfect illustration of the in-betweenness characteristic to this local variant of Eastern Christianity. During its existence, the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church was subject to incessant fluctuations and internal transformations between two poles of attraction: the Latin and Byzantine worlds. Several authors consider that the contradictory attraction to both East and West, the ‘orientation problem’of the UGCC, is the permanent dilemma that has pervaded the church’s history (Hann 2003; Boyko …