Download Referendum for the shift of the parish to Greek Catholic Church

The Referendum
In May 1990, L’viv city council proposed a solution, which outlined a general
rule for resolving conflicts related to church buildings: state representatives
would conduct local referenda on each contested church and the results
would determine property usage rights. A group of lay people from the old
Sykhiv went to the head of the district council. The group was led by
Volodmyr Thatchyk, a resident of Sykhiv who, though not a regular
churchgoer, had been involved in the reorganization of the Greek Catholic
parish after 1989. The group asked for St. Mykhail church to become Greek
Catholic.
The local administration proceeded according to city council regulations by
organizing a referendum in the church. The commission administering the
referendum included council deputies and representatives from the church
council (dvadtsjatka). The committee prepared three hundred printed ballots
on which it was written: ‘Which Church do you want St. Mykhail to be: Greek
Catholic, Orthodox or other?’ Having found an official way to organize the
appropriation of the church, the committee took care of the remaining
details, putting announcements in the church and preparing the social club of
one of the nearby factories for the referendum. Only inhabitants of the
streets surrounding St. Mykhail church, mostly in old Sykhiv, would vote in
the referendum, even though this very parish church in question was the
only one available for the entire district of, at that time, 100,000 people. The
decision to restrict the process to a few hundred people rather than to the
entire district made it possible for the committee to better control the
referendum.
The Orthodox priests, Volodymyr Tsiopka and Volodymyr Kuzio refused to
accept the procedure, keeping the church locked during the referendum, and
prohibiting the posting of public announcements in the church. They also
urged their parishioners to abstain from the referendum. Some people did
not go in the end because they were afraid – the parish community was
already split in two and the more vehement group was the newly-formed
contingent of Greek Catholics. The referendum was organized without
incident and many people from other parts of L’viv came to support the
Greek Catholics, mobilized by priests. Even today, people remember the
results of the referendum, and stress the importance of the support they
received from other L’vivians. There were over two hundred votes for Greek
Catholic, fourteen for Autocephalous, and seven for Orthodox, so the church
was to be given to the Greek Catholics. According to the state
representatives and the winning ‘party,’ the democratic exercise worked out
well, but one practical question was still unsolved. The problem was how to
convince the Orthodox priests to give the church to a group of lay people
who claimed themselves to be the representatives of the parish community.
The two priests, Fr. Tsiopka and Fr. Kuzio, refused to recognize the results of
the referendum and remained in the church. The authority of the committee
was limited during those times of uncertainty, and apparently they could not
force the priests to relinquish the church.
The actual handover happened a few weeks later through an action that was
equal parts ‘official repossession’ and ‘illegal seizure’. Again, accounts of
what transpire differ: Greek Catholics say that they convinced the cantor to
give the church keys to Yury Hrynchyshyn, the ‘state authority’ that could
mediate the transfer. Orthodox people recall that the turnover was achieved
by force; a group of Greek Catholics guilefully entered the church and forced
the cantor to give them the keys. That Saturday Greek Catholics occupied
the church and barred the Orthodox priests and those neighbors recognized
as ‘Orthodox’ from further entry into the premises.
Source: Vlad Naumescu 2007. Soviet Realities and the Post-Soviet
Making of Churches. In Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity:
Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine, pp. 69-106. Berlin:
Lit Verlag.