The news that the Ukrainian Parliament has banned the Russian Church has sparked little interest in the West, likely because the issue has not been well understood. What drew more attention, however, was the strong and decisive opposition from the Pope, who proclaimed that churches should not be touched and that everyone should have the right to pray as and where they wish, according to their own conscience.

Let's try to clarify the situation by starting with a brief historical reference.

The first state of Christian Slavs was the Principality of Kyiv around 800 AD, founded by the Rus, a group of Vikings known locally as Varangians. Having been converted by Greek missionaries (the most famous being Cyril and Methodius), they followed the Greek rite (which we now call Orthodox).

However, when the Greek Church definitively split from the Latin Church (the Great Schism of 1054), Greek-rite Christians formed autocephalous churches (which we call Orthodox): each people (or more precisely, each state) had its own independent church, while the Catholic (i.e., universal) Church recognized the authority of the successor of Peter, the Roman Pontiff. This meant that each national church relied on and was aligned with the State (similar to the Lutherans), focusing solely on strictly religious and liturgical matters. In contrast, the Catholic Church embraced all nations and states and therefore did not take sides in internal conflicts among Catholic nations; moreover, it was heavily, some say overly, involved in social issues.

The Principality of Kyiv first split due to internal strife but was completely overwhelmed in the 1200s by the invasions of the Mongols under Genghis Khan, leaving it under the rule of their successors, Islamic peoples from Central Asia known as Tatars (often spelled Tartars in the West), who still live in Russia today.

Meanwhile, other Slavs had been converted by Germanic and Latin missionaries, becoming Catholics (such as Czechs, Slovaks, and Croats), and, of particular interest to us, Poles and Lithuanians, who occupied Ukraine in the 1600s. Ukraine became a battleground among them, the Muslim Tatars, and the Orthodox Principality of Moscow (which referred to itself as the Third Rome).

At one point, Khmelnytsky, an ataman of the Cossacks (Ukrainian military fraternities), sought help from Moscow's co-religionists against the Polish Catholics, and gradually, with varying fortunes, Ukrainians became part of the Russian Empire, accepting the Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate.

However, part of Ukraine, which we call Galicia (not to be confused with the Spanish region), known in Ukrainian as Halychyna (now the Lviv Oblast), remained with Poland, and the local church accepted the transition to Catholicism, while retaining the Orthodox rites it had always followed (this became the Greek Catholic or Uniate Church). In the 1700s, with the partition of Poland, Galicia became part of the Catholic Habsburg Empire, and after 1918, it again became part of Poland before finally reuniting with the rest of Ukraine and joining the USSR at the end of World War II. The Greek Catholic Church was particularly persecuted by Stalin and his successors because it was seen as linked to Catholicism, the enemy of communism.

With the final fall of communism, religious freedom was restored. However, since Orthodox churches are autocephalous (i.e., national), an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church was formed, no longer tied to Moscow. Nevertheless, the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine (about a quarter of the population) continued to adhere to the Church under the Moscow Patriarchate. Thus, Ukraine today has four Christian churches: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Greek Catholic Church, and the Latin Rite Catholic Church for the few remaining Polish residents.

With the outbreak of the current Russo-Ukrainian war, tensions arose among the churches. The Uniate Catholic Church, while locally supporting Ukrainian claims, found itself in an awkward position because the Pope, from the outset, prioritized the pursuit of peace over nationalist claims. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church unconditionally supports the government, following Orthodox tradition.

The Russian Church, however, has found itself in significant difficulty because the Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, also unconditionally supports Putin. For this reason, from the beginning of the war, members of the Russian Church clergy were viewed with suspicion and sometimes arrested for treason. After the invasion began in the spring of 2022, the Russian Church in Ukraine declared itself autonomous from Moscow, removing all references to the Moscow Patriarchate, including Patriarch Kirill's name from prayers, as was customary. However, this was not enough. After a year and a half of tension and setbacks, the Ukrainian Parliament passed new laws banning any "religious organization subordinate to those of the aggressor country." While the Russian Church in Ukraine is not explicitly mentioned, the intent is clear and unequivocal: President Zelensky claims the law aims to defend national security and strengthen the nation's spiritual independence.

In short, the last thing anyone would hope for is another religious conflict that has bloodied these lands for centuries. We in the West are now committed to complete religious freedom, and this law is certainly not welcomed as it contradicts the idea of a democratic Ukraine fighting against Russia's absolutism.

On the other hand, there are no significant doctrinal or even ethical-cultural differences. For example, while Moscow's Patriarch Kirill describes the war in Ukraine as a sort of crusade against the decadence of the West, allegedly dominated by LGBT influences, even the Patriarch of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church of Kyiv, Filaret, a few years ago, called Covid a divine punishment for the acceptance of LGBT rights.