You won’t enter heaven via a stolen church
“YOU WON’T ENTER HEAVEN VIA A STOLEN CHURCH.”
These words were spoken to me yesterday over the phone by a close acquaintance from Ukraine. She had long been a parishioner and choir member of one of the UOC churches that was “transferred” to the OCU a couple of years ago. For more than twenty years – up to the “transfer” – she had served as the church’s typikon keeper. Hardly a single service took place without her participation, for when she occasionally could not come, the other readers and singers would get confused, not knowing what followed what or how to connect the readings.
Now, on Sundays, as she walks from her home to the liturgy quietly celebrated by a UOC priest somewhere in a private apartment in the same town, she passes her former church with sorrow – the church to which she had devoted nearly a quarter of a century of her life.
When I myself enter one or another Catholic church in Germany, I often see a very different picture. During off hours, when no service is being held but the church is open, visitors are offered to purchase various items and souvenirs: candles, figurines of saints, booklets about the church, magnets, postcards, books, and so on. Each item has a marked price – but there is no cashier. You can freely take what you wish, leaving the indicated amount in a donation box nearby. Everything is based on the elementary honesty of visitors – on the belief that people who enter a Christian church are not thieves.
It is difficult to imagine such a picture in Orthodox churches in Ukraine. To simply allow visitors to come in, freely take candles, small icons, or crosses – and not monitor whether they pay – would seem risky. The fear that everything would soon be stolen is, for us, either a theoretical anxiety or a practical certainty.
But then – what does it mean to light a stolen candle before an icon? Or to pray at home before an icon that one consciously stole from a church? What kind of person would do that? A Christian, who believes in the all-seeing and righteous God, or a half-pagan, who in reality believes in magic, in enchanted objects and incantations that supposedly have some supernatural power of their own? A person who thinks that a stolen candle has the same “effect” in the spiritual world as one lawfully purchased for a donation?
Questions of this kind come to mind often when I see photos and videos online from churches recently “transferred” from the UOC to the OCU. The standard pattern of many such “transfers” is well known: against the will of the priest (as head of the religious community) and his regular parishioners, local authorities hold a fictitious “community meeting” to approve the move to the OCU. They gather (or sometimes bring in) random people who have nothing to do with the parish but happen to live nearby and are hostile toward the UOC. After a vote to “transfer from the Moscow Church to the Ukrainian one,” the authorities seize the church and hand it over to the OCU. The UOC priest and the vast majority of his faithful parishioners, readers, singers, and altar servers usually refuse to join the OCU.
A priest from a neighboring OCU parish is then assigned to that church to conduct services.
And so this new priest of the OCU enters the “transferred” church for the first time, accompanied by his brought-in choir, to celebrate the first service there.
Everything here is not theirs. Every item in that church had been collected or purchased over years – sometimes decades – by a completely different community. The new “owners” have nothing whatsoever to do with any of it. They do not know how or when any object appeared there, who bought or donated it – they cannot name a single person. The icons, liturgical vessels, candle stands, books, and music folders – everything, from the seven-branched candelabrum on the altar to a simple stool in the choir loft or even a light bulb in the chandelier – belong to another community.
The vestments now worn by the new “head of the religious community” (who had never before been in this church) were in fact bought and used for years by another priest. They were not handed over to him as to a rightful successor (as happens when a new rector is appointed by a bishop). Like everything else in that church, those vestments were not transferred – they were taken.
This is not a question of war, or “spiritual occupation,” or “spiritual independence,” “national identity,” “civilizational choice,” or geopolitics.
Just as in the example of the German churches I described earlier, this is a question of ordinary human decency – simply the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.”
For the new “owners,” both the church itself and everything in it are not merely someone else’s property.
They are stolen.
