Chersonesos
A Pearl for the Catholic Archaeologist

The first Christian in Chersonesos, according to an ancient book, was the holy Apostle Andrew. It states that: “When Andrew was teaching in Sinope and came to Korsun (Chersonesos) in the Crimea, he learned that the mouth of the Dnieper River was nearby. Wishing to go to Rome, he sailed to the mouth of the Dnieper, and then travelled upstream.” In the 4th century the historian Lucius collected many apocryphal writings about the work of St Andrew and his disciples, Rufus, Alexander and Philomen on the northern shores of the Black Sea and further inland in what is today Ukraine. The Apostle came to the future site of Kiev, blessing the hills about it and predicting that a great city with many churches would arise there. To this day the Church of St Andrew honours his memory in the Ukrainian capital.

2nd Century
Pope Saint Clement I

Between 92 and 101 A.D., the fourth Pope, St Clement I, along with the Roman patrician Domitilla and several hundred Christians were exiled to Chersonesos by the Emperor Trajan. According to the church histories of Origen and Eusebius, St Clement was exiled for having converted several prominent Romans. He converted all those he found in Chersonesos and established 75 other churches in Scythia. In the year 101 St Clement was martyred in the city at the Emperor’s orders; his work there had incurred further imperial wrath. His body was weighed down by an anchor and thrown into the sea, but the prayers of his disciples caused the waters to part and open a path to his body, which lay in a beautiful submerged church. Tradition tells us that every year on his feast day the waters would part for a few days that pilgrims might revere his relics.

In 431 and 451 A.D. we find the Bishop of Chersonesos, Eutherius, at the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and in the 5th century we hear of another Eutherius, a saint who was banished from the city and martyred in the mouth of the Dnieper.

	Saints Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs

9th Century
St Cyril and St Methodius

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Chersonesos served as the primary Byzantine and Christian outpost north of the Black Sea. Saints Cyril and Methodius, the great Apostles of the Slavs, stopped in Chersonesos in about 860 A.D. on their way into Khazaria. It was here that St Cyril, who was to be inspired by God to write the first Slavonic Alphabet, first heard the language of Rus’. Here too the brothers found a Gospel and Psalter written in the Rusyn language. With the help of George, Bishop of Chersonesos, the two apostles sought out the body of the Holy Pope Clement and took some of his relics away. These they carried to Pope Adrian II in Rome, and it was his successor John XV who sent this head of St Clement to St Vladimir as he besieged Chersonesos in the 980’s. This relic is still preserved at Kiev.

Next month we shall see Chersonesos besieged by the Grand Prince St Vladimir in a bid to win the hand of the Princess Anna of Constantinople

Participate in the painting of Tradition’s most beautiful church
How to help Tradition in Western Ukraine

The exterior of the church - the three round domes were all added recently.

For the past seven years the parishioners of Saints Peter and Paul Church in Riasne, Lviv, Western Ukraine have extensively restored and repainted their parish church under the direction of Fr Basil Kovpak. Riasne has also become a centre of traditional resistance to Modernist innovations amongst Ukraine’s Greek Catholics. Ukrainian law provides for ownership of a parish church by the parishioners themselves. Thousands of these parishioners have voted to keep their traditional priest and to resist the modernist hierachy, but the fight is not over. As this month’s back page eloquently testifies, Father has put his heart and soul into building a worthy temple of God and a bastion of Tradition at very great cost to himself and his people, none of whom is rich in worldly goods. Father’s seminary is also full. With 16 seminarians entering this year, and too few rooms to house them, their material problems are only just beginning. Fr Basil is responsible for a big parish as well as being rector of a seminary, chaplain to nuns, and head of an organisation of priests in union with Bishop Fellay and the SSPX. Please be generous in your help towards them. They are very much in need of good benefactors! Cheques may be made out to ‘Transalpine Redemptorists’ and sent to:

Rev. Fr Basil Kovpak
Golgotha Monastery Island, Papa Stronsay, Orkney, KW17 2AR, Great Britain.
These funds will be personally delivered by ourselves, as it is dangerous to post money to Ukraine.

The newly built and frescoed dome.

The altar through the Royal Doors.

The iconostasis.

The team of painters who wish to come to Papa Stronsay next year !		Holy Unia. A panel from the roof of the Riasne Church.		The nave.

The frescoes of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts above the entrances to the side altars.

The hand carved and painted Stations of the Cross.

St Josaphat, Martyr of Holy Unity Patron of Tradition in Ukraine

Born in 1584 in Vladimir (today in Ukraine, then in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth), St Josaphat came from a family of honourable Christians of the Byzantine Slavonic rite in use among the Ruthenians [the people of modern Ukraine and Belarus]. His mother took care to raise him in the fear of God, and for 30 years he recited daily and unfailingly a large section of the Divine Office which he had learned by heart. He was most devoted to Our Lady.

In 1596 the Ruthenian Church was divided into two contending parties - those in favour of the Union entered into with Rome at Brest-Litovsk that year, and those who persevered in schism. With anguish our Saint saw this growing division, and that few were remaining faithful to the Holy See, the safeguard of the True Faith. He studied philosophy and theology under two famous Jesuits, and decided to enter monastic life. Casting aside the goods of this world he entered the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Vilnius, Lithuania to follow the rule of St Basil the Great. He received the religious habit and was professed in 1604.

Ordained a priest in 1609, he began to preach in various churches of the city, bringing back many dissidents to the Union. In 1614 his friend Metropolitan Joseph Rutsky confided the monastery of the Holy Trinity to his care. Meanwhile he continued to preach union with such success that Catholics called him the ‘Scourge of the Schismatics’, and the latter the ‘Ravisher of Souls’.

St Josaphat became the Archbishop of Polotsk in 1617, at the age of 38. He was soon to acquire, in a certain Meletius Smotrytsky, a formidable enemy. The latter had himself consecrated as rival bishop of Polotsk by Russian schismatics, and despite the opposition of King Sigismund of Poland, who forbade all his subjects to have any communication with the usurper, he won adherents. The people of the city of Vitebsk turned toward the newcomer in large numbers, and rose up violently against their lawful pastors.

When Archbishop St Josaphat went there to calm the tumult in 1623, he knew well that his hour had come. “Grant that I be found worthy, Lord, to shed my blood for the union and obedience to the Apostolic See”, he had prayed, and his prayer was answered on 12 November as an enraged mob cruelly butchered him and profaned his body. He was in his 44th year.
After five days his mortal remains were recovered from the waters of a river and taken to Polotsk to be exposed to the veneration of the faithful. For nine days they constantly emitted a fragrance of roses and lilies, and a councillor of the city abandoned the schism merely at the sight of the Saint’s beautiful countenance. Many of the parricides struck their breasts, and did likewise. The martyr had gone gladly to his death, offering his life that the schism might end; he had said as much beforehand, and amongst the many miracles consequent to his murder was the conversion of his assassins. Four years later the author of the troubles, the dissident bishop Meletius Smotrytsky, was himself struck with remorse and consecrated his life to penance, prayer and the defence of the Union. Such changes of heart are indeed the greatest of miracles, won by the sanctity of the true servants of God.

Some years after St Josaphat’s martyrdom his body was found to be incorrupt, though the clothing had rotted away. Again in 1637 and 1767 it was found to be still white and supple. It was eventually taken to the Basilica of St Peter in Rome where it reposes today. Pope Leo XIII canonised St Josaphat, Martyr of Holy Unity, in 1867. †
[After the Vies des Saints, by Mgr Paul Guérin (1882)]

[After the Vies des Saints, by Mgr Paul Guerin (1867)]

Tradition Persecuted in Western Ukraine
A visitor reports...

In September this year a new book appeared on the shelves of a single bookstore in Ukraine. Yet the impact of this one book in a lone bookstore is potentially explosive, for the work concerned is the first truly open exposé of the struggle for Catholic Tradition in Western Ukraine. The author is Fr Basil Kovpak, a priest who will be familiar to many of our readers from the publications of the SSPX. He is the founder of the Priestly Society of St Josaphat and a seminary which is working in union with the SSPX under the authority of Bishop Fellay.

Fr Basil’s book, (only available in Ukranian at present, unfortunately) details some of the more personal aspects of his 12 years of resistance to modernism from a rather unique standpoint. He emphasises the fact that priests should first and foremost be working for the salvation of souls; it is abundantly clear that this is his own guiding principle.

Fr Kovpak studied clandestinely for the priesthood at a time when the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine was still the world’s largest banned organisation. The years of Soviet persecution and catacomb existence produced great defenders and confessors of the Faith, and the most important element in Father’s formation was the example of old priests and monks who had spent years in deportation and imprisonment, and who returned home aflame with this same burning thought and desire, the salvation of souls.

The writer of this article recalls being shown the grave of one such priest in the graveyard of his church. Fr Basil had taken care of him on his return from Siberia as nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. Why? Because he was not ecumenical, he would not compromise. In a certain way many of these stories make our struggle to keep the Catholic Faith in the West seem very little. Certainly, such rejection has been the lot of many priests in the free world. But to live through the Gulag and return home to be rejected by that very Church for which you have suffered for decades is almost too terrible to comprehend!

After the funeral of another priest, his bereaved parishioners approached Fr Kovpak and asked for his help. These good people now had no truly Catholic pastor, and Father clearly realised the urgent need for true priests in Western Ukraine, priests after the Heart of Our Divine Saviour who would give their all for His Church and for souls.

Readers may wonder why we delineate Western Ukraine so specifically. This is because that region has very specific and complex problems where the fight for Catholic Tradition is concerned. To analyse these problems would go beyond the scope of this article, but we might summarise them as follows. In the West we tend to apply an easy rule of thumb: traditional Catholic priests do not offer the Novus Ordo Missae, they offer the Tridentine Mass.

In the East things are far less clear, since there is no Novus Ordo Missae, and the criteria are completely different. Whilst the Catholic Church cherishes the rites of the East in their integrity, there is nevertheless a tendency to introduce a false indifferentism which uses liturgical reform as a pretext. The popes have always condemned this dangerous orientalisation which seeks to eliminate all which is specifically Catholic in the worship of Greek Catholics so as to weaken faith in the One True Church.

It is an historical fact that the Greek Catholics of Western Ukraine have borrowed numerous Latin, specifically Catholic elements into their devotional life. Today’s attempts to ‘purify’ Greek Catholic life of these elements mean that in practice orientalisation is a cover for modernism in this region, whatever its merits in other times and places. The modern hierarchy is hell-bent on destroying all vestiges of the traditional rite practised in Western Ukraine in order to further their false ecumenism.
This endeavour will lead to schism, since ecumenism in Ukraine has a specific, nationalistic goal. With three major warring schismatic Patriarchates as well as the Greek and Latin Catholics, the government is only too eager to encourage false ecumenism in order to arrive at a single Ukrainian Church to bolster national identity.

The present leader - the self-styled ‘Patriarch’ - of the Greek Catholics, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar is at present trying to force Fr Kovpak to declare himself to be schismatic, repeatedly asking him to state publicly to whom he is loyal: to himself or to Bishop Fellay; if to the latter, he wants Father to stop naming him (the Cardinal) in the Liturgy. He thus hopes for a perceived public declaration of schism.

Ironically, Cardinal Husar is standing on very shaky ground himself! His own episcopal consecration was as illegal in the eyes of the Vatican as were those performed by Archbishop Lefebvre; he was consecrated a bishop in secret in Rome by the late Cardinal Slipyi acting without papal approval. Thus the Cardinal is careful not to mention why Mgr Lefebvre was ‘excommunicated’, stressing rather that we “do not accept Vatican II”.

The retention of Old Church Slavonic as a liturgical language is another important issue at stake. Though the Ukrainian vernacular has been used since the 1940s, the plea that it will unite Ukrainians is false, as Fr Kovpak stresses; it serves to divide us further. The constant emphasis on vernacular isolates thousands of souls, particularly Russians, from a liturgy celebrated in a foreign language. The liturgy celebrated in Slavonic shows the Church as she is - Catholic. †

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