Want a “Ukrainian Vatican”? Give the Lavra back to the Church and go home

Ostapenko speaks in the Refectory Church before ambassadors. Photo: press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Reserve director Maksym Ostapenko told Ukrainian diplomats that the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra should become a “Ukrainian Vatican.” So let’s unpack what that actually means.

Start with the Vatican. It is not a museum complex and not a tourist brand. It is a sovereign state whose head is not a president elected by the people, but the head of the Catholic Church – the Pope. In other words, Vatican City is governed by a church leader, and all of its property belongs to the Roman Catholic Church.

Now take the Lavra. Sts. Anthony and Theodosius did not found it as a museum, a concert hall or a venue for political conferences. They founded it as a place of monastic struggle. The caves were dug for seclusion and prayer. Everything built above them over the past thousand years – churches, monastic buildings, the bell tower – was built around the Liturgy.

The “national reserve” here is a leftover of the Soviet regime – the same regime that turned the Lavra into a museum in 1926.

If Ostapenko’s logic is followed to its conclusion, the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra should become the same kind of state within Ukraine that the Vatican is within Italy. And in that case, the Lavra should be governed not by the Ministry of Culture and not by the preserve administration, but by the Primate of the Church – in this case, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry.

And if the Lavra really is to become a “Ukrainian Vatican,” then Ostapenko should pack his bags, the reserve staff should go home, and prayer should once again fill the Lavra’s churches.

The logic is simple and obvious.

But our religion commissars seem to have very particular needs when it comes to logic.

Then again, so did their Soviet predecessors.

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