Speaker: Dr. Anatolii Babynskyi, Notre Dame Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology and the History of Christianity
The evolution of the idea of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Patriarchate is linked to the
broad historical, social, and cultural landscape of Eastern Europe, but it is also deeply
rooted in the ecclesiological tradition of Byzantine Christianity. In diverse periods, the
elevation of Kyiv to the status of a patriarchate was seen as a method to overcome a
schism within the Kyivan Church or to cement the unity of the scattered Greek-Catholic
dioceses. In the twentieth century, thanks to the neo-Byzantine renaissance in the
Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the idea of the Kyivan Patriarchate challenged
Roman Catholic ecclesiology by raising the question about the place of Eastern Catholic
Christianity within the Catholic communion.