History of Ukraine's Church of the catacombs being recorded (06/16/02)

History of Ukraine's Church of the catacombs being recorded

Religious Information Service of Ukraine

LVIV - The Institute of Church History at the Lviv Theological Academy has begun videotaping the testimonies of 50 of the oldest surviving members from the underground of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (UGCC). The accounts of these survivors, all over 70 years old, will be included in a documentary film about the UGCC's illegal existence in Ukraine from 1946 to 1989. This news was reported by the newspaper "Postup" (Progress) on June 4.

In hourlong interviews, bishops, priests, priests' widows, religious men and laity talk about important events in their lives and the ordeals they had to undergo, professing Christian values in defiance of Soviet ideology.

"These people are gradually passing away," notes Iryna Kolomyiets, head of the institute's pastoral department. "So we are simply obliged to leave their recollections, emotions, and worldviews on film, to show future generations the right way to go. It is our duty to show and to preserve the faces of these everyday heroes."

In addition to the video project, since its founding in 1992 the Institute of Church History has been compiling a "living history" archive of the underground UGCC. This archive is a collection of texts, audio files, authentic documents and photographs. It is expected that the archive will soon be available not only to scholars and researchers, but will also be put up on the Internet. (The institute already has a website, available in English and in Ukrainian, at http://www.ichistory.org.)

The institute has collected 1,320 interviews, more than 2,000 photographs and 200 unique museum exhibit items. Nadia Rodnenkova, head of the archive and computer department, believes that for the next century researchers will have plenty of work to do in this field.

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