Profiles of fortitude
Subtitle: an oral history of the clandestine life of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, 1946-1989
Publisher: Instytut istoriï T͡Serkvy Ukraïnsʹkoho Katolyt͡sʹkoho universytetu
Published: 1992
Place of publication: Lʹviv
Language: ukr
Number of pages: 6734
Subjects: Ukrainian Byzantine rite; History; Monasticism and religious orders; Bishops; Biography; Monks; Nuns; Priests; Communism and Christianity; Persecution; Church history; Catholic Church; Ukraïnsʹka katolyt͡sʹka t͡serkva
Description: Since 1992 the Institute of Church History (ICH) has systematically collected and critically analyzed oral testimony about Ukrainian Catholic religious life in the underground. This collection includes interviews that the ICH has conducted with a broad range of Ukrainian Catholic clergy, religious, and laity representing three generations. These biographical narratives focus on typical as well as outstanding members of the religious underground, the spiritual convictions that sustained them, and the means of preserving and transmitting Christian values in the family, community, and Ukrainian society in general.
Notes: 50 interviews + transcripts.

1 CD Room contains 45 files of transcripts in Microsoft Word format.

Box contains 45 files of printed transcripts.

From 1946 to 1989 the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) entered, adapted to, and ultimately lived a clandestine experience, in many respects unprecedented in religious history. Within a modern totalitarian society that made a concerted and systematic effort to control all manifestations of religious expression, the UGCC was able to preserve its structure, form two generations of ecclesiastical leaders, and maintain the implicit if not explicit allegiance of significant segments of the population. From 1946 the UGCC was not only the most numerous banned ecclesiastical community in the world, but it remained the only broadly based social institution in Ukraine to escape the control of the official Soviet establishment. In the late 1980s it emerged from the underground sufficiently vigorous to play a major role in the religious, political, and cultural arenas.