Dr Kateryna Budz
Combe Trust Fellow, September 2022 - February 2023
Dr Kateryna Budz is a scholar specialising in the history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) in the 20th century. She holds a PhD in History from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2016), having completed her BA and MA studies at the same university. During the academic year 2012-2013, Kateryna Budz was a Black Sea Link Fellow at the New Europe College (Bucharest, Romania). In September-December 2014, she pursued her research as an exchange student at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (Toronto, Canada), and from January to October 2015 she was a DAAD Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale, Germany). Her doctoral project looked at the strategies of survival and resistance employed by the clandestine Greek Catholics in the Soviet Union after official abolition of the UGCC in Galicia in 1946. During her stay at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Budz will work on turning her doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript.
Project title: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Galicia (1946–1968): Strategies of Survival and Resistance in the Underground
During the Second World War, the West Ukrainian region of Eastern Galicia became a part of the Soviet Union. In 1946, the Greek Catholic Church, which was the Church of most Ukrainians in the region, was officially abolished through its allegedly voluntary “reunion” with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Under state pressure, the majority of Greek Catholic clergymen and laypeople “reunited” with the ROC. Nonetheless, most monks and nuns as well as a part of the Greek Catholic clergy and believers refused to change the Church’s jurisdiction.
The study mainly focuses on the strategies of survival and resistance employed by the Ukrainian Greek Catholics who refused to join the ROC and professed their faith clandestinely. First, the research looks at the strategies of their survival in Soviet society, including participation of young Greek Catholics in the Communist organizations and the clandestine clergy’s secular work. Concealment of faith or hiding one’s Greek Catholic identity offer a vivid example of how theology was influenced by the security context. Second, the proposed study deals with the Greek Catholics’ strategies of resistance, ranging from legal forms of protest to outright confrontation of believers with the representatives of Soviet authorities, including agents of the state security service, the KGB. By using the above survival and resistance strategies, clandestine Greek Catholics were able to preserve their denominational identity in a hostile environment up to 1990, when the UGCC was finally legalised.