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Ukrainian bishop, American Church. Constantine Bohachevsky and the Ukrainian Catholic Church. By Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak. Pp. xxii + 535 incl. frontispiece and 13 figs. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018. $75. 978 0 8132 3159 4

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Ukrainian bishop, American Church. Constantine Bohachevsky and the Ukrainian Catholic Church. By Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak. Pp. xxii + 535 incl. frontispiece and 13 figs. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018. $75. 978 0 8132 3159 4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

Alexis Tančibok*
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak's biography of her uncle, Constantine Bohachevsky (1884–1961), is a window into a period of transition for Ukrainian Catholics from being Eastern European immigrants to being ethnic Americans, recounted through the experience of one well-positioned individual. Accounts of the internal tensions within Eastern European immigrant communities are uncommon and through her biography Bohachevsky-Chomiak details the challenges and controversies that Bishop Bohachevsky faced between his taking responsibility for the nascent Ukrainian Catholic Church in the United States in 1924 and his death in 1961. Bohachevsky-Chomiak details how, as bishop, Constantine realised that the Church in America was in danger of becoming a conveyance for socio-political agendas tied to events in Ukraine, rather than, as he believed it should be, a Church serving the spiritual needs of Ukrainians in the United States. She shows how he had the foresight to recognise that the social and political ties to Europe were changing, even dissolving, and that the cohesion of the Ukrainian Catholic community was at stake and needed a new focus. He instead emphasised institutional loyalty to the pope, and focused on building communal institutions in the United States, such as schools for Ukrainian Catholics. Bohachevsky-Chomiak demonstrates how, through his own experience of dealing with other Ukrainian Catholic clergy and bishops in Europe, as well as in the Vatican, Bishop Constantine carried his emphasis on institutional development beyond the community in the US and laid the groundwork for a conference of Ukrainian Catholic bishops which he hoped would help to shore up the Greek Catholic presence within the Vatican hierarchy, and to develop its existing presence in the Americas, namely in Brazil and Canada. Bohachevsky-Chomiak treats the opposition of Latin rite American bishops almost in passing. However, it was opposition from American bishops such as John Ireland, not just to ethnic Roman Catholic parishes, but also to the presence of Eastern rite Catholics in the United States, that resulted in the conversion of Alexis Toth and his congregations to Orthodoxy in 1892. Toth remained an active missionary until his death in 1909, drawing large numbers of Greek Catholics to the Orthodox Church. Bohachevsky-Chomiak observes that Bishop Bohachevsky struggled to stem the flow of Ukrainian Catholics to the Orthodox, but only hints at the complex causes. Bohachevsky resisted Latinisation within the Church, and reformed ritual and praxis to weed out those Western rite practices that had crept in; a drive he started while still a priest in Ukraine. However, he was pragmatic, and sometimes compromised, as with the controversial issues of the Julian versus the Gregorian calendar, and the use of enclosed confessionals. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak's account of her uncle's contribution to the establishment of the Greek Catholic Church in the United States is a broad ranging text. On occasion, it understandably risks slipping into hagiography, and at some points would have benefitted from a more direct account of Constantine's own words. However, the story of Eastern Christianity in the United States is largely ignored by church histories, making this a rare and useful account.