Illnyk, Ukraine
Posted on 06/07/2002 8:18:18 PM PDT by JMJ333
On October 27, 1947, Bishop Teodor Romzha, head of the Mukachevo-Uzhorod diocese of Trans-Carpathian Ukraine (or Ruthenia), was returning from the reconsecration of a restored church in the small village of Lavky to the diocesan seat. Two priests and two seminarians from the village accompanied him in his horse-drawn cart — the Soviets would not allow him to use a car. At a relatively deserted point between two small towns, the cart had an “accident” with a Soviet armored vehicle. Everyone survived the crash, however soldiers jumped out of the vehicle to finish the job with rifle butts. The clergymen were tough, though. Peasants took them to a nearby hospital where they were treated and began to recover.
Bishop Romzha had his jaw broken in two places, almost all his teeth knocked out, and severe bruises all over his body. He had to be fed through a tube and regretted that his injuries prevented him from receiving communion. After about a week of normal convalescence, he died suddenly in the early morning hours between Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, 1947. A nun who worked in the hospital later recounted what happened. The Communist hospital director, Dr. Abraham I. Bergmann, ordered everyone out of the ward where the bishop was being treated. A special nurse was brought in to take care of the bishop. Her treatment consisted in administering a dose of poison that brought about the bishop’s departure from this world.
The Soviets had their reasons to fear Bishop Romzha. A young, energetic, and absolutely unyielding leader, Romzha had denounced the pressures being put on his people by the combined efforts of the Soviet authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox themselves had suffered terrible persecution at Soviet hands and, no doubt, quite a few of them deplored the persecution of their Greek Catholic brothers and sisters. But the Moscow Orthodox leadership had been used by Stalin beginning in 1943 to help rouse the people for the “great patriotic war” against the Nazis. After the Germans were repelled, Stalin decided to continue manipulating the population by bringing as many believers as possible under the sway of the co-opted Moscow Patriarch Sergei. In much of Ukraine, this led to violent acts against Catholics who refused reunion with the Orthodox and the state-imposed substitution of Orthodox leaders in Catholic dioceses and parishes.
On Good Friday of 1947, in the Uzhgorod Cathedral, Romzha had publicly denounced these measures as “the lawlessness of the dark forces of hell.” He was not exaggerating. Soviet agents organized an illegitimate sobor (council) of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which no true bishop attended. All but Romzha, including the great national leader Metropolitan Joseph Slipyi, were imprisoned and several (M. M. Budka, H. L. Khomyshyn, Gregory Lakota, Petro Verhun) died under detention as did many priests, nuns and lay people. Those present at the sobor were manipulated into liquidating the Ukrainian Catholic Church by making it part of the Russian Orthodox system. In a single stroke, the Soviets had eliminated over 4 million Catholics together with the whole Church hierarchy within their post-World War II holdings. The Ukrainians became the largest suppressed group of believers on earth until they arose again after the 1989 fall of Communism.
To an outside observer, it might seem strange that the Soviet Union would fear these Catholics. But the attention they paid Romzha is indicative of the strategy the Soviets adopted towards stamping out all potential centers of resistance to their totalitarian dominance of the peoples under the regime. Pavel Sudoplatov, who directed the operation against Romzha, has since revealed that then-Ukrainian Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev and Stalin himself knew of the plot, which was intended to clean out the “terrorist nest of the Vatican in Uzhorod.” An often-repeated remark of Stalin’s represents him as scoffing, “How many divisions does the pope have?” But in fact, he and his cronies thought of the Holy See as their most challenging moral foe before, during, and after the Second World War.
That is why the “nurse” who administered the poison to Romzha was a KGB agent. In the various parts of Western Ukraine, the Soviet strategy aimed at liquidating the Greek Catholic Church, the traditional religion of many of the people and, in certain areas, a faith that claimed almost the entire population. The deputy director of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine had visited Romzha and told him bluntly that the “Greek Catholic Church cannot exist in the Soviet Union.” Romzha replied, “I would sooner face torture and death than betray the true Church of Christ.”
His outburst reflected the attitude of his whole people. Romzha told his clergy, “Do not give in for anything in the world.” They listened: both clergy and lay people in Ukraine vigorously resisted Soviet pressures to convert and flocked behind Romzha. In 1945, 50,000 faithful made the traditional pilgrimage to Cerneca Hora on the Feast of the Assumption to hear him preach. In 1947, when the Soviets tried to co-opt the populace by taking possession of Cerneca Hora and installing subservient Orthodox clergy there, only 3,000 made the pilgrimage. Instead, 80,000 showed up at Romzha’s celebration near Mukachevo. After that, the authorities kept him under close surveillance and would not allow him to leave his residence. His death came when, a few months later, he chose to go to Lavky anyway, despite all warnings.
Bishop Romzha was only one of many brave believers who paid the ultimate price for their loyalty to the faith in Ukraine. As horrible as their experiences were, their commitment bore rich dividends. When the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was allowed to resurface in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it showed that it had maintained a remarkable underground existence. Eight covert bishops appeared along with 1,000 priests and 1,200 nuns — all in a church that had not existed officially since the 1940s. Thanks to the faithful acceptance of much suffering and not a few heroic martyrs, the Ukrainian Catholic Church endured a half-century of persecution and arose from apparent death to quite vibrant life.
Illnyk, Ukraine
Landscape near the Carpathian mountains.
Then, at the beginning of 1930, they began to round up the families too. This was more than the GPU could accomplish by itself.All Party activists were mobilized for the job. They were all people who knew one another well and knew their victims, but in carrying out this task they became dazed, stupefied. They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children “kulak bastards,” screaming “Blood–suckers!” And those “bloodsuckers” were so terrified they had hardly any blood of their own left in their veins. They were as white as clean paper. The eyes of the Party activists were glassy, like the eyes of cats. They were in the majority after all, and they were dealing with people who were acquaintances and friends.
True, they were under a spell—they had sold themselves on the idea that the so-called “kulaks” were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a “parasite’s” table; the “kulak” child was loathsome; the young “kulak” girl was lower than a louse. They looked on the so-called “kulaks” as cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive: they had no souls; they stank; they all had venereal diseases; they were enemies of the people and exploited the labor of others. . . . And there was no pity for them. They were not to be regarded as people. . . .
The [Party] activist committee included all kinds—those who believed the propaganda and who hated the parasites and were on the side of the poorest peasantry, and others who used the situation for their own advantage. But most of them were merely anxious to carry out orders from above. They would have killed their own fathers and mothers simply in order to carry out instructions.
And the worst were not those who really believed the destruction of the kulaks would bring about a happy life. For that matter, the wild beasts were not the most poisonous among them either. The most poisonous and vicious were those who managed to square their own accounts. They shouted about political awareness—and settled their grudges and stole. And they stole out of crass selfishness: some clothes, a pair of boots. It was so easy to do a man in: you wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows. . . . . . .
What torture was meted out to them! In order to massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings. . . .
And so, at the beginning of 1930, they began to liquidate the kulak families. The height of the fever was in February and March. They expelled them from their home districts so that when it was time for sowing there would be no kulaks left, so that a new life could begin. That is what we all said it would be: “the first collective farm spring.” It is clear that the committees of Party activists were in charge of the expulsions. There were no instructions as to how the expulsions should be carried out. One collective farm chairman might assemble so many carts. . . .MORE
"Kulak" or "bourgeois" were usually synonymous with "Christian." Everyone knew who the targets were. Over 7 million dead and some in the west still claim the famine was mostly the work of bad planning and weather.
Óæãîðîä: êàôåäðàëüíûé ñîáîð 1646 ã. [ Uzhgorod Cathedral]
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No, the kulaks were the farmers who had privatized. They were budding capitalists.
I also think of the Orthodox Russian saint known as St. Elizabeth the New Martyr. How Christians have suffered, but how glorious their fidelity to Christ.
I have become very interested in the messages of Our Lady of Soufanieh and her calls for unity among Christians and for a united date for Easter. In the days to come whether we call ourselves Catholic, Orthodox, or by some other name, we will find in facing the world and the State that we have great need of each other in withstanding as Christians.
I am not familiar with these apparitions/messages. But a united Easter would be a wonderful place to start!
It is also very moving that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople just celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the Catholic Cathedral in Ravenna, Italy. The first time that has happened since 1054. We must be one, because Jesus told us to be one, but we cannot do it by lowest common denominator theology. There is sacrifice, humbling ourselves, and learning from each other on the road ahead if we are serious about fulfilling Jesus' prayer we may be one.
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