STENYATIN, Ukraine -- The lofty stone church is padlocked shut, a heavy chain around its doors. A lone rooster clucks amid the weeds of the empty churchyard. Just a few yards away, more than 100 worshipers crowd outside a cramped cottage, straining to hear as Father Yaroslav conducts his Sunday service inside.
The tears start to flow as the story of this churchless congregation unfolds. "It's not fair," weeps Anna Pototsko, 79, as a silent chorus of neatly kerchiefed heads nods in agreement. "We are crying every day."
In this village divided, the tearful Orthodox believers have lost their church to their Greek Catholic neighbors as a result of the upheavals of history. A decade ago, the collapse of the Soviet Union opened up new freedoms here, enabling the rebirth of old faiths that had been suppressed by Soviet power. That has led to new struggles between competing religions in the borderlands of western Ukraine. And now this tiny village is caught between the Orthodox faith, which was tolerated under communism, and the Greek Catholic religion that was suppressed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Beginning Saturday, Pope John Paul II steps into the whirling debate with a visit to Ukraine that is expected to draw the country's largest crowds since it won independence 10 years ago. Even as the pope celebrates the resurrection of the Greek Catholic Church, his impending visit has also served to reinflame Orthodox anger over the reversal of their fortunes in such towns as Stenyatin.
Here, the contest over the church goes back at least to 1946, when Stalin banned the Greek Catholics and handed their churches over to the Russian Orthodox Church, which was run from Moscow and officially tolerated by the atheist Soviet state. After Ukraine became independent, the Ukrainian Greek Catholics proudly restored their religion -- and eventually took back Stenyatin's lone church.
And so, for eight years, Yaroslav's Orthodox flock has been locked out, accused of being collaborators with the hated Soviet regime. "They call us Communists, they call us Moscowphiles," said Grigory Golovchuk, a village elder with a booming voice. "But we are Ukrainians, too."
"It's not about faith," said the priest. "It's about politics."
But faith and politics are inseparable here in western Ukraine, where the religious feud started not with Stalin but centuries before, in 1596, when renegade local Orthodox leaders swore allegiance to the Vatican and created the Greek Catholic Church.
Today, Alexy II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, asserts that modern-day Greek Catholics are waging "religious war" against his loyalists here. And he has made increasingly strident demands that the pope put off his trip here until the dispute is settled.
In an area where reborn Greek Catholicism has become intertwined with anti-Russian political nationalism, the clashes here are not just over who controls the churches, but over the extent of Russian influence on Ukraine, a country poised between Europe's capitalist West and its post-Soviet East.
So when the popemakes his pilgrimage next week to the western Ukrainian regional capital of Lviv, just 70 miles south of this village, he will be visiting a place where the insults of history are still raw, where echoes of the 400-year-old ecclesiastical rift between the two churches resound and mingle with the open wounds of more recent violence.
In the graceful city of Lviv, a vast majority of the population has returned to its Greek Catholic Church. The Russian Orthodox Church that once ruled the city's soaring cathedrals has been reduced to two modest parishes. And the pope from nearby Poland is being greeted as a victorious general in the war on communism he helped to lead in the 1980s.
The city has about 800,000 residents, but more than 1.4 million people are expected to show up for the pontiff's Mass on June 27 -- "one of the biggest gatherings ever in the history of Ukraine and probably Eastern Europe," according to the Rev. Ken Nowakowski, spokesman for the organizing committee.
In this proudly nationalist area occupied for hundreds of years by a succession of Polish, Austrian, German and Russian overlords, many Lviv residents say the real purpose of the pope's visit is to celebrate political as well as religious independence.
"This visit is very important recognition of Ukraine as a state," said Mikhail Kulik, a retiree who carries a cross blessed years ago by the Greek Catholic leader-in-exile. "Many people in the world still perceive Ukraine as just part of Russia. But Russia should not be our older brother anymore. We should be equals."
But elsewhere in Ukraine, where the majority of the population still adheres to the Orthodox Church, which split with the Vatican in the Great Schism of 1054, the pope is likely to meet a more ambivalent reception.
Overall, the Greek Catholics of western Ukraine are a small minority of about 6 million in a country of almost 50 million people. There are even fewer Roman Catholics, about 1 million total. Orthodox believers are estimated at around 30 million, but they are fractured between the majority, who still are subject to the Moscow patriarchate, and those who worship with two splinter groups that have emerged since Ukrainian independence.
In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where John Paul will arrive Saturday and crowds of about 400,000 are expected, Orthodox activists loyal to the Moscow patriarch have staged almost weekly protests, waving placards saying things such as "Pope -- Persona Non Grata" and "Pope, Hands Off Orthodoxy!"
In an interview, Bishop Mitrofan, the chief administrator for the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, said dismissively: "Why is the pope coming on a mission to preach Christ to us? For 1,000 years already we have been illuminated with the light of Christ's teaching. It's Catholic propaganda, proselytizing, that brings him here."
But so far the public protests have been limited to a relatively small circle of Orthodox leaders and Russian politicians.
Metropolitan Filaret Denisenko, leader of the breakaway Ukrainian Orthodox Church, asserted pointedly that "only 5 percent of the Ukrainian population are against the pope's visit." Filaret said he planned to meet John Paul and that his loyal-to-Moscow Russian Orthodox rivals were simply acting as Kremlin pawns.
"The pope's visit will increase the gravitation of Ukraine toward Europe and the West. Russia doesn't want this, which is why they don't want the pope to come here," Filaret said.
Entangled in this game of high politics is the complex history of the Greek Catholic Church itself.
Born on the eve of the 17th century in a schism encouraged by western Ukraine's Polish rulers, the church today identifies itself with the struggle against Soviet rule. Forced underground by Stalin in 1946, its leaders shot or deported to Siberia, the church survived through secret meetings and whispered confessions. Its members had no choice but to pretend to become Orthodox.
"It's impossible to imagine what we went through," said Marta Tsehelzka, 76, whose late husband was a member of the underground priesthood. After refusing to convert to Orthodoxy, he served five years in the gulag; she was arrested separately and deported to a logging town in Siberia with their young children.
Like many other Greek Catholics here, she said she believes the Russian Orthodox simply stole when given the opportunity by the Communists.
In 1989, the reaction against the Russian Orthodox in western Ukraine began when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared religious freedom again. Within months, hundreds of priests -- together with their churches and their congregations -- switched back from Orthodoxy to Greek Catholicism. Many other parishes joined the new independent Orthodox Church run by Filaret.
The Russian Orthodox Church's decline was swift.
In 1990, the Moscow patriarchate controlled more than 1,200 parishes in the Lviv area. Two years later, only 15 remained.
The angry leftovers of battles are still to be found in the village of Stenyatin, where the Orthodox faithful insist they are just as much victims of power politics as the Greek Catholics were under communism.
"In western Ukraine, being Orthodox means nothing," said Yaroslav, the priest. "I served two weeks in a Soviet jail for glorifying Christ. Now in free Ukraine they still want to jail me." Back in 1993, when the Greek Catholics came to get their church back, he resisted, was fined 2,000 rubles and spent years in court fighting a criminal case that was ultimately dropped.
If peace prevails now, it is an uneasy one. Just recently, two Greek Catholic churches in neighboring villages were set on fire; the Catholics say the Orthodox did it, the Orthodox claim provocation. And in Stenyatin, a new confrontation looms over the Orthodox plans to build a wooden roof over the courtyard where they now hold their Sunday services.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company