“Thank you, Ukraine, for defending Europe in your tireless and heroic struggle against the invaders! What European leader has thus paid tribute to the courage of the Ukrainian resistance fighters in their "heroic" fight against the "invaders"? The answer is unexpected. This sentence was pronounced in kyiv by Pope John Paul II at the end of his trip to Ukraine, on June 27, 2001. It will be agreed, without excessive emphasis, that it had something prophetic about it.
→ READ. Silence and unease in Moscow around the possible visit of Pope Francis to kyiv
John Paul II knew Ukraine better than the Ukrainians themselves, then divided within a brand new State in search of its coherence. The future pope had grown up in a Poland whose eastern capital was Lwow, the “Lviv” of today. Before being elected pope, Professor Karol Wojtyla had taught for twenty-five years at the University of Lublin, close to the border of Soviet Ukraine. He knew, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the USSR (1991), that it would not be enough to bring down the Iron Curtain, a symbol of the Cold War, to restore the unity of an ancestral Christian Europe too long cut in two.
Cultural and religious divide
John Paul II knew by heart the religious and cultural gap, even civilizational, which distinguished since the 15th century the heirs of the "Third Rome" instituted in Moscow by Tsar Ivan III to definitively replace the first Rome destroyed by the barbarian invasions, and the second, Constantinople, wiped off the map by the Turks in 1453. He also knew that a nation stood, from the beginning, on the line of the border separating this new Orthodox civilization from the old Christian West doomed to slander: l 'Ukraine. He had a particular tenderness for those millions of Ukrainian Christians who had "united with Rome" in 1596 so as not to depend, precisely, on the Patriarchate of Moscow. These Catholics, of the Byzantine rite, had been banned by the Kremlin in 1948. John Paul II had not failed to greet them in 1988, on the eve of the millennium of the Rus' of kyiv, in a specific text: the letter Magnum baptismi donum, distinct from his apostolic letter Euntes in mundum intended for the Russian Orthodox.
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: what the Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow said to each other on the phoneA detail had not escaped observers of the famous trip to Ukraine in June 2001: demonstrations against the visit of John Paul II had filled the streets of kyiv, the day before his arrival, organized by… the Patriarchate of Moscow! Which would never have taken such an initiative without the green light from the Kremlin, occupied for eighteen months by a certain Vladimir Putin.
European project
John Paul II's European project was already going against the fundamental interests of Moscow. On December 1 , 1989, three weeks after the fall of the Wall, the Polish pope clearly expressed his vision when he received the head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the Vatican. The two men were mutually astonished by agreeing on what should become of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, this "common European home" advocated by the man of perestroika, which the Pope wanted she now breathes "with her two lungs", Western and Eastern: there is no question, for either of them, of seeing Eastern and Western Europeans give in to the sirens of a West dominated by Americans, whether politically or culturally!
→ ANALYSIS. Critics in Ukraine after the idea of a common way of the cross, in Rome, between Russians and Ukrainians
Before leaving the Vatican, enthusiastic, the head of the Soviet CP invited the pope to Russia. Surprise: the Patriarchate of Moscow immediately opposed such a project! Marginalized, Gorbachev! Concealed, John Paul II! Vanished, the dream of a reconciled and autonomous Europe! The Atlantic Alliance and the proliferation of McDos, on the one hand, Russian imperial resentment and the myth of the “Third Rome”, on the other, filled the civilizational vacuum created by the break-up of the USSR. The Ukrainian nation found itself undecided, hesitant, straddling the border which separates Europe "degenerate", "perverted" by the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the gay prides (sic), and the glorious "Russian world" heir of the "Third Rome", jointly led by the ambitious Vladimir Putin and his friend Kirill, Patriarch "of all the Russias".
A quarter of a century after his visit to kyiv, what would John Paul II say when he saw the Ukrainians fighting to push back towards the east this fatal border that he had so hoped to break down? “Thanks to you, Ukraine, who defended Europe…”
