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The Services for Josafat Kuntsevych, Afanasiy Filippovych, and Andrzej Bobola

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The Services for Josafat Kuntsevych, Afanasiy Filippovych, and Andrzej Bobola Contemporary Ecumenical Challenges of Historically Charged Liturgical Cult: The Services for Josafat Kuntsevych, Afanasiy Filippovych, and Andrzej Bobola Maria Takala-Roszczenko* The seventeenth century was a period of political and religious turmoil in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. The confessional conflicts produced martyrs whose cults consolidated the confessional boundaries of the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox, and the Greek Catholic Church. In my article, I compare three such saints: Josafat Kuntsevych (1580-1623, Greek Catholic), Afanasiy Filippovych (c. 1595–1648, Orthodox), and Andrzej Bobola (1591-1657, Roman Catholic), who were martyred in the hands of their Christian neighbours. For material, I use the hymnographical services composed for the saints. I argue that, in quest of genuine ecumenism, certain content in these services, such as exclusive concepts of the true faith and church unity, may actually induce rather than prevent hostility between the Churches. Keywords: hymnography, liturgy, Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, confessionalization, ecumenism, saint, cult, martyr Introduction The seventeenth century was a period of great political, social, and confession- al turmoil in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, a multi-ethnic state that covered large areas of Central Eastern Europe. The religious plural- ism of the Polish-Lithuanian society was, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, giving way to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church, which was being restored after the Protestant Reformation had shaken its foun- dations in the sixteenth century. The movement of the “religious tectonic plates” in the Polish-Lithuanian lands also resulted in a division within the Eastern Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kiev. In 1596, at the Union of Brest, representatives of the Kievan Metropolitanate proclaimed their loyalty to the Roman See.1 During the following century, the new Greek Catholic Church * Maria Takala-Roszczenko, Assistant Professor of Church Music, School of Theology, University of Eastern Finland, Matarakatu 35, 80130 Joensuu, Finland, [email protected]. 1 Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church. Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in 18th-century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, DeKalb, Northern Illinois University Press 2009, p. 4. For an analysis of the process leading to the union, see: Borys Gudziak, Crisis and RES 12 (1/2020), p. 13-39 DOI: 10.2478/ress-2020-0002 Maria Takala-Roszczenko and the Orthodox Church wrestled over legitimacy as well as property as two parallel Eastern Rite Churches.2 The struggle became politicized in the second half of the seventeenth century when the uprising Cossacks claimed the Orthodox cause with the support of the Muscovite Tsar.3 The troubled time was burdened with violence. Confessional conflicts were often loaded with political or ethnic motives, or vice versa, and resulted in bloodshed. Yet from the perspective of the Church – Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Greek Catholic –, the tragic fates of individuals were ex- tremely useful as fuel for each respective confessionalization process. The victims, perceived as martyrs, became cornerstones for the local construction of the Church. At the same time, they came to embody of the confessional antagonism that has continued to feed mistrust and prejudice between the Churches over the centuries. Since these saints perished literally in conflict with another confession, their veneration as martyrs inevitably stands in contrast with the perpetrators of their death, who in turn may have become hailed as defenders of faith in their own community. This article focuses on three prominent saints produced by the seventeenth-century confessional conflicts in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Greek Catholic saint Josafat Kuntsevych, Archbishop of Polotsk, from the monastic Order of Saint Basil (1580-1623), was an active advocate of the Greek Catholic Church and a controversial figure es- pecially in his dealings with the Orthodox faithful. He was murdered in his own diocese, in Vitebsk, in 1623, by enraged masses of Orthodox peo- ple.4 The Orthodox saint Afanasiy Filippovych, Abbot (igumen) of Brest (c. 1595-1648), was a polemicist, whose campaign against the Union of Brest led him to trouble with the Polish authorities, who suspected him of be- ing a spy for Moscow. He was tortured and executed by Polish (Roman Catholic) soldiers.5 Finally, the Roman Catholic saint Andrzej Bobola was a Jesuit missionary (1591-1657) and an equally passionate advocate of church Reform. The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press 1998. 2 For an evaluation of the consequences of the Union of Best, see, for example: Bert Groen, Wil van den Bercken (eds.), Four Hundred Years: Union of Brest (1596-1996): A Critical Re- evaluation, Leuven, Peeters 1998. 3 B. Skinner, The Western Front, p. 88-94. 4 A biography in: E. A. Vernikovskaya, “Иосафат Кунцевич (1580-1632), Полоцкий архиепископ греко-католической церкви” [Josafat Kuntsevych (1580-1632), Archbishop of Polotsk of the Greek Catholic Church], in: Славянский альманах [Slavonic Anthology], Moscow 2001, p. 20-41. 5 A short biography in: I. G. Moroz, “Афанасий” [Afanasiy], in: Православная Энцикло­ педия [Orthodox Encyclopedia]. I have consulted the electronic version of the article, http:// www.pravenc.ru/text/76850.html, viewed September 30, 2019. 14 Contemporary Ecumenical Challenges unity, which in the seventeenth-century Roman Catholic terms typically de- noted the conversion of the Orthodox into the Roman Catholic Church. During the Cossack uprising, he suffered torture and death in the hands of the (Orthodox) Cossacks.6 My research was sparked by an interest in seeing whether the confes- sional controversies from which these saints emerged continue to inform their reception today, or more precisely, whether their contemporary liturgi- cal cult transmits ideas that could be perceived as anti-ecumenical. The idea of ecumenism in relation to early modern confessional questions is, of course, anachronistic, as such a frame of thought is of a much later time. Yet if one perceives “the restoration and manifestation of Christian unity in faith, life, and mission” as the ultimate goal for contemporary inter-Christian relations, as it has been promoted by the modern ecumenical movement since the ear- ly twentieth century,7 it is worth exploring whether the past antagonisms, in the shape of controversial saints, may potentially hinder the perspectives of Christian reconciliation. In this article, I will turn to contemporary liturgical services, dedicat- ed to these three saints, with an aim to analyse what kind of representations they provide of the three saints in light of inter-confessional relations. My analysis focuses on the following questions: How does the hymnographical ser- vice present and interpret the saint’s actions with respect to his own Church or to the “opposing” side? What kind of challenges may these representations cause for the contemporary ecumenical cause? While acknowledging the primary func- tion of liturgical texts as spiritual, as vehicles of prayer and spiritual edifi- cation, I would like to argue that, if taken literally and reflected against the historical context of the saint, these liturgical services may actually induce rather than prevent hostility between the Churches. The liturgical worship has played an important role in the construc- tion of the past in different contexts. As Sean Griffin argues in his fascinating investigation into early Russian liturgy, the liturgical rites can be perceived as “a public technology for creating and controlling cultural memory”.8 Medieval clerical writers “created versions of the past that bound people 6 An extensive biography in: Ks. Jan Popłatek T.J., Błogosławiony Andrzej Bobola Towarzystwa Jezusowego: Życie – męczeństwo – kult [The Blessed Andrzej Bobola of the Society of Jesus: Life – martyrdom – cult], Kraków 1936. 7 Ola Tjørhom, “The Early Stages: Pre-1910”, in: Geoffrey Wainwright, Paul McPartlan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecumenical Studies, https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/ view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199600847.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199600847-e-1, viewed February 18, 2020. 8 Sean Griffin, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press 2019, p. 21. 15 Maria Takala-Roszczenko together in imagined communities”, thus cultivating a sense of a common identity.9 In the liturgical commemoration of the saints, the past actualizes, or as Erin Kathleen Rowe points out, The liturgy brings the past into the present through an ongoing celebration of a cycle of events. […] Thus, the celebration of a specific saints’ feast days renders the distant past deeply relevant and immediately present […].10 Following this frame of thought, my approach to the liturgical services con- siders the texts as actively constructing the community or the confession they represent. Thus, their function is not limited to interpretations of the past, but they continue to shape identities and ideas of a community even contemporarily. It is, of course, relevant to ask whether these three saints, Josafat Kuntsevych, Afanasiy Filippovych and Andrzej Bobola, are the most repre- sentative for the analysis of the ecumenical challenges arising from histor- ically charged cults. The seventeenth century alone produced a number of martyrs on confessional grounds.11 Yet what
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