The Institute of Church History

Established: 1992
Director: Oleh Turii, Candidate's Degree in Historical Studies
Tel.: (380-322) 76-27-77,
Tel/fax: (380-322) 79-85-96
e-mail: ichinbox@ichistory.org,
See fully illustrated website at www.ichistory.org

Purpose: To study the history of Christianity in Ukraine in the context of Eastern European Church history

Fields of activity:

• Systematization of sources
• Collection of oral testimonies
• Analytical and general studies of individual problems and phenomena of Ukrainian Church history
• Translations and publications

Academic projects:

• "Fortitude and Flexibility: The Oral (Living) History of the Underground Life of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, 1946-1989"
  The purpose of the project is to collect and conduct a scholarly interpretation of the testimony of witnesses regarding the forced liquidation of the UGCC by Soviet authorities and testimony about the religious life of its faithful and hierarchy.
• "AUFBRUCH: Status of the Churches of Eastern and Central Europe in post- totalitarian societies"
  In 1997 "living history" project became a constituent part of the international comparative research initiated by the Pastorales Forum in Vienna. This forum is headed by Prof. Paul Zuhlener and under the patronage of the Council of European Bishops' Conferences. The purpose of the project is to provide a theological interpretation of the experience of the communist period in order to develop a pastoral strategy for the Catholic Church under the current conditions of transition.
• "The Church in the Life of Society: Inter-Confessional and International Relations in Halychyna, 1772-1989"
• "Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Eparchial Visitation Record: Cataloguing and Publication"

Departments of the Institute of Church History

An archive and museum department were founded to collect, store and analyze the information which comes to the Institute of Church History as part of the project "The Living History of the Underground of the UGCC."

The computer department provides computer services for the ICH. A major task of the department is to create the computer database of the Institute.

The pastoral department maintains contact with people who were repressed for their membership in the underground UGCC offering them moral and material support.

Institute of Church History Celebrates 10th Anniversary

The Institute of Church History (ICH) was founded to spread the news about a great spiritual treasure: the heroic martyrdom which the underground Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church suffered from 1946 to 1989. The living witnesses of the underground Church, priests, monks, nuns, and laity, are passing into eternity. The Institute’s task is to gather these eyewitness accounts and to analyze them with scholarly methods.

The ICH’s founder and director for a decade was Fr. Borys Gudziak, Ph.D., current rector of UCU. In 2002, Dr. Oleh Turii (pictured here with Cardinal Kasper) was chosen as the new director. As Chair of the History Department of the Theology Faculty, Dr. Turii has been awarded the Bohdan Bociurkiw Memorial Faculty Scholarship. This award was graciously endowed by the St. Florian Foundation and its benefactors Joan and George Weigel, renowned Catholic author and member of the UCEF Advisory Council. The ICH played a significant role in the revival of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. It became the base on which the Lviv Theological Academy, now the Ukrainian Catholic University, was revived in 1994.

Using the newest developments in information technology, the ICH has created a computer archive unlike any in Europe: every Internet user can listen to digitalized interview recordings and work with transcripts and copies of documents.

In its 10 years of activity, the ICH has conducted an extensive oral history project with 1400 individual interviews that include:

• over 50,000 pages of transcribed and digitalized material
• audio archives with 2,200 hours of recordings

In addition, the institute has collected:

• more than 2,000 original documents from KGB and communist party archives
• 5,000 photographs
• 200 authentic museum artifacts