The Catholic Church and the Real History of Ukraine
My New Essay for Public Discourse
I am thrilled to share my new essay for Public Discourse! This piece has really been a labor of love. It started life as a term paper for a Ukrainian history course I took at Harvard during grad school. I then expanded it into a 40 page Master’s thesis almost exactly 5 years ago. At the time, the role of the Catholic Church in Ukrainian identity formation was a niche topic, to say the least. I suppose it still is, in the sense that it receives far too little attention, but when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I realized that the topic needed to be part of our public discourse. For a couple years, I toyed with the idea of publishing my research in a more accessible format, but last summer I really devoted myself to rewriting and editing it. It took a little while to find the right home for this piece, but I am so glad it ended up at Public Discourse. It’s still on the longer side (around 4000 words), but I believe well worth your time. If you need convincing, here’s a taste:
The traditional opening of the Ukrainian national anthem is “Ukraine is not yet dead.” Against the odds, the Ukrainian spirit has survived through the centuries. The world saw this spirit when Ukrainians rose to the defense of their homeland as Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv. If Ukraine is not yet dead, it is in part thanks to the Catholic Church and her faithful, both past and present; if Ukraine is to live on, neither conquered by Russia nor ideologically colonized by the secular West, overcome neither by despair nor by bitterness, she needs the support of the Catholic Church. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic faithful, both lay and religious, are already hard at work helping their country to forge a future worthy of human dignity. Catholics, both in the United States and globally, should acknowledge their Church’s contributions and reject Putin’s narrative, a narrative that writes both the Catholic Church and the Ukrainian nation out of history.
You can read the full essay here:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/06/98189/
I hope you’ll read and share.