In Ukraine, Believers Fight Over What Is the One True Faith

URIZH, Ukraine — Maria Prokhmalskaya, a feisty 69-year-old, knew it was a sin to get into a fistfight, especially during Lent.

But she plunged into a quarrel, lost control and hit a fellow villager in Urizh named Anna Sopotnitskaya.

"I want your blood now. I want the entire world to look bleak for you," Prokhmalskaya, a Greek Catholic, shrieked at Sopotnitskaya, 45, a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox flock.

Enraged, the two women swung their fists at each other, spat and stamped their feet, each certain of her place in heaven and the other's destiny in hell. At the heart of their quarrel: the village church, a shabby wooden building nonetheless claimed by both flocks.

"Greek Catholicism is the real religion. You're nobody," Prokhmalskaya screamed. "You should forget the road to that church."

In western Ukraine, where the Greek Catholic Church was suppressed by Stalin in 1946 in favor of the Russian Orthodox Church, the wounds of history still throb red and raw.

Pope John Paul II plans to visit the region in late June, despite bitter opposition from the Moscow-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox Church--the largest church in the country--which warns that a visit by the Roman Catholic pontiff will spark street protests and has vainly asked him to postpone it indefinitely.

But for Catholics here, John Paul's visit would be a celebration of the bravery of those martyred during Stalin's time.

After the quarrel at the church, Prokhmalskaya made an almost miraculous transformation from a screeching fanatic back into a sweet, beaming lady. She was almost contrite, sure that God had seen it all.

"I'll have to ask forgiveness for it. But sometimes I just can't contain my emotions and I lose control and I can't bear an unrighteous thing happening before my eyes," she said. The unrighteous thing, apparently, was Sopotnitskaya hovering too close to the church.

Early that sun-drenched day at the end of February, the deputy chief of the local administration, Orest Lutsin, came to Urizh with several police officers to enforce a court order that the Greek Catholic community give up the church to the village's Ukrainian Orthodox minority.

The Greek Catholic community has two other churches in the area, but the Orthodox faithful have only a vacant cottage at the top of a long steep track, impossible for elderly people to reach.

Besieged by several hundred furious Greek Catholic villagers, Lutsin gave up and left, his second failed attempt to transfer the church.