DIRECT
EXAMINATION OF DEFENSE WITNESS,
Professor
Thomas E. Bird,
Queens College,
The City of New York
by Mr.
Smorodsky:
P. 80 MR. SMORODSKY: Yes.
Defendants call Professor Thomas Bird to the stand, please.
T H O M A S E. B I R D, A
WITNESS FOR THE DEFENDANTS, SWORN.
JURY ATTENDANT: Thank you, sir. Please be seated. State your name for
the record.
THE
WITNESS: Thomas E. Bird, B-I-R-D.
DIRECT EXAMINATION BY MR. SMORODSKY:
Q. Professor Bird, by whom are you employed?
A. Queens College, the City University of New York.
A. I've been a member of the faculty for 38 years and have had a
number of positions. Currently I'm the Deputy Chair of the
Department of European
Literature.
Q. Now, what is your educational background?
A. I completed my Bachelors at Syracuse University, magnum cum
laud. Did a Masters in Language at Middlebury College,
did a second Masters in
Literature at Princeton, and am leaving this weekend to defend a doctoral
dissertation at Warsaw
University.
Q. In what subjects?
A. Slavic literature.
Q. Now, do you have any proficiencies in foreign languages?
A. Yes. I read-write English, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, among others.
Q. Polish was one of them?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Modern Greek?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Now, what subjects have you taught?
A. I have taught the History of Christianity, Ecumenical Orthodoxy, Orthodoxy in the United States, the Slavs and Byzantium,
B-Y-Z-A-N-T-I-U-M, at Fordham
University and at The City University.
Q. Are you coeditor of any scholarly publications?
A. Father George Maloney, SG, and I co-founded and co-edited a
journal at Fordham University, Diakonia. It was devoted to
the Orthodox-Roman
Catholic dialogue. It has since moved to the University of Scranton in
Pennsylvania. Eva
Piddubcheshen and I
co-edited a publication at Fordham University entitled "Archiepiscopal and
Patriarchal Autonomy."
I have been an editor or coeditor of a volume entitled -- I said Fordham, yes – entitled "Aspects of Religion in the Soviet
Union," published by the
University of Chicago Press, and most recently I co-edited a volume about the
Ukrainian
philosopher and theologian,
Hryhoriy Skovorda. H-R-Y-H-O-R-I-Y, last name S-K-O-V-O-R-D-A. Yes, sir.
Q. Have you been or contributor to any encyclopedic publications?
A. I've contributed to the Encyclopedia of Religion published by
Corpus Publication in Washington DC, to the Dictionary of
American Ethnic Groups,
published by Harvard University Press. Those were articles on churches
including the Orthodox
churches. Encyclopedia Britannica over a period of some 15 years.
Q. Now, have
you participated in any scholarly symposium where the bishops of the UOC-USA
have also participated?
A. I've attended various seminars, academias, symposia, where I
have heard and spoken with Patriarch Mstyslav,
Archbishop Antony, when
he was alive, Bishop Mark Hundiak, H-U-N-D-I-A-K, as well as with a number of
Catholic
Bishops of Ukrainian
background, Bishop Austin, Archbishop Stephen Zulli (phonetical).
Q. Now, have you received any awards for your scholarly endeavors?
A. Cardinal Slipyj, the Ukrainian Archbishop of Lviv, named me a
faculty member to the St. Clemens Ukrainian Catholic
University in Rome,
after I had been involved in the study of Ukrainian issues for a dozen years.
The Ukrainian Free
University in Europe awarded
me an Honorary Ph.D. for my contributions to Ukrainian studies. The Ambassador
of
Ukraine has given me an
award in appreciation for my work in Ukrainian studies. Cardinal Silvestrini,
the Prefect of the
Sacred Congregation for
the Oriental Churches, invited me to give the keynote address two years ago in
Boston to a
meeting of the Eastern Catholic
Bishops of North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. His Holiness
Pope
John Paul the Second named me a Knight
Commander of the Order of the Most Holy Sepulcher because of my
ecumenical research and
involvements.
Q. Have you been a consultant to the United States Conference of
Bishops?
A. The Bishops of the United States, after Vatican II, set up
several dialogue groups between representatives of the Roman
Catholic Church and
various other churches, and Cardinal Cushing of Boston appointed me to the
National Dialogue
Committee between
Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics. In 1970 I was named a consultant to
the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops for Eastern Christian and Eastern Orthodox affairs.
Q. Now, are you a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the United
States of America?
A. No. I am a Roman Catholic layman.
MR. SMORODSKY: Your Honor, I offer
Professor Thomas Bird as an expert on Orthodox thought and the Ukrainian
history, Orthodox history.
MR. REHILL: Your Honor, obviously Professor Bird has a wide range of knowledge and experience. I'm not sure that I
have any understanding of the scope of expert
testimony that will be coming from him. It is my understanding that his
testimony was
going to be regarding history and that he was going to be testifying regarding
the history of the –
MR. SMORODSKY: Among other
things.
MR. REHILL: -- the Church. So, to the
extent that, I mean, it almost comes down to when an opinion question is asked,
I
reserve the right to object to a question
if it doesn't fall within the scope of what we just heard, because I don't know
whether the scope of his
knowledge in those areas, since I don't know there is, in fact, we require
expert testimony.
THE COURT: Was there
discovery on this issue? Expert report, for example?
MR. SMORODSKY: There was an
expert report filed, your Honor, back in 1999 together with his credentials.
MR. REHILL: Oh, yeah. The question is
when of history -- it if it's a matter of history, I certainly knowledge Professor
Bird is knowledgeable
in the history of the Church.
THE COURT: There seems to
be a suggestion that this was going to be broader than that, the questioning.
MR. SMORODSKY: There will
be testimony on the history and the meaning of certain phrases in the Orthodox
world.
MR. REHILL: I'm not going
to object to that.
THE COURT: Okay. Fine. Then
plaintiff accepts Professor Bird as an
expert in those areas. Let me -- just bear with me
and close off the skylight
there.
MR. SMORODSKY: Certainly.
THE COURT: Okay. Thank you.
BY MR. SMORODSKY:
Q. Professor Bird, when and how did Ukrainian Orthodoxy begin in
Ukraine?
A. Christianity was brought to Ukraine, in the consensus of
historians, was at the invitation of Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Some
Byzantine missionaries,
Greek speaking, Greek culture, brought the faith of Byzantium to Kiev and to
Kiev and Rus, the
medieval state that is
now on the territory of Ukraine. The historians traditionally say that western
Christendom, united
around Rome, and eastern
Christendom, united around Constantinople, divided in 1044. The story is, of
course, more
complex than that, but
we'll take that for the sake of argument and say that when Christianity came to
Kiev and Rus to the
forerunner of present day Ukraine, there
was one Christendom. After 1054, Christianity in Ukraine was allied, identified
itself with orthodoxy,
with the Orthodox Church. In the 1400s, the independent Metropolia, which has
evolved on that
territory of Kiev and
Rus/Ukraine, was suppressed by the political and church authorities of the
Russian State in Moscow.
Recently, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Mother Church, if you will, of Christianity in the Ukraine, has recognized
that succession of the
Ukrainian Metropolitan as illegal, uncanonical, and unacceptable. The memory of
that independent
church is something that
is very real in the minds of church people, intellectuals in Ukraine for all of
those centuries.
And at the turn of the century from the 1800s to the 1900s, there was a growth in national consciousness, national
awareness in eastern
European areas, including Ukraine, which had never lost its sense of being a
nation, a nation state, a
nationality. And under
Orthodox cannon law and practice, each nation is entitled to its own church
headed by its own
Primate. That awareness evolved
and became very clear in Ukraine in the teens of the 1900s. But the Russian
Orthodox
Church, a very powerful force in the Russian Empire, was
not willing to grant that kind of independence, separateness. Saw
any move in that direction as divisive, and refused in any way to cooperate with the Ukrainian clergy and Ukrainian Church
laity who were anxious to have
their own national church.
Q.
Now professor –
A. Sir?
Q. -- at that particular time,
let's take the 1700s and the 1800s, Ukraine was dominated by two political
powers, correct?
A. Poland and Russia.
Q. Now, did anything develop with the Christian Church or the Orthodox
Church in the territory that was dominated by
Poland?
A. Orthodoxy, Orthodox Christians lived in all over eastern
Europe, and there developed in Poland an Orthodox Church, an
organized church body consisting of priests, bishops, diocese, that was
recognized and
empowered by the Church of
Constantinople, by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which recognized an autocephalous, independent, Orthodox Church in
Poland. I choose that term
rather than Polish Orthodox because the people who belong to that church were ethnically,
they were citizens of Poland, but they were ethnically Ukrainian and Belarusian.
Q. You are
talking about the Church, the Orthodox Church of Poland which developed in what
years?
A. This recognition by Constantinople took place in 1924.
Q.
Now, what I'm driving at is the question I have is on the territory of Poland
in the 16th and 17th century. Did a portion of
the Orthodox faithful join the Catholic
Church?
A. Yes. The Orthodox
community that I mentioned that was scattered all over eastern Europe and lived
partially in Poland
lost its hierarchy, in
effect, at the end of the 1500s when the Orthodox bishops of that territory, today's
Poland for the
most part, joined,
became part of the Roman Catholic Church, permitted by Rome to maintain their
Orthodox
appearance,
liturgy, language, customs, so that in
every external way they appeared to be Orthodox but were now what
has come to be called
Eastern Catholics in Communion with Rome.
Q. A short term for that Catholic Church of Ukraine, would the term
"uniat" describe them?
A. As Father Bazyl said
this morning, that was the term of derision of insult that was coined by the
Orthodox, indicating that
they had united with Rome and so the Eastern Catholics took that amiss, but, yes, that's the shorthand term.
Q. During the late 1900s, early 20th Century, was there an immigration
of Ukrainians to the United States and Canada?
A. Very large.
Q. And from where and which territories did these people primarily come
from?
A. They came from various
parts of Ukraine, but the greater part of them, the majority were from western
Ukraine, the
province called Galicia,
which had been under the Austral-Hungarian Empire for much of its existence
and, therefore, was
more western, more
European, and more strongly uniat under a Catholic empire, the
Austral-Hungarian Empire.
Q. And did these immigrants
create parishes throughout the United States?
A. They did, and it's a
very sad story of what happened because they came in large numbers, and the
American Roman
Catholic bishops, for
the most part, ignored them, did not speak their languages, did not know their
history, did not offer
them spiritual help,
supervision. And so what happened was that those uniats, those eastern Catholic
Ukrainians, would
form communities, form
organizations, form churches, parishes, and then would negotiate back home in
Ukraine for a
priest, and priests
came. There was not the kind of tight control that there is today in either the
Orthodox or Roman
Catholic Church,
certainly not in the Eastern Catholic Churches. And the parishes would engage
their own, invite and
engage, employ, and house their own priest who would come to them from Eastern Europe.
Q. And this is in the
immigration that was primarily Uniat Catholic?
A. Correct.
Q. Now, did anything -- strike that. What was the -- what were some of
the traditions that were unique to the
Ukrainian
immigration in the United
States?
A. The Ukrainian Catholics had been accustomed
in the homeland to two features that were novel and unacceptable here in
the United States.
One was a married clergy. The only Catholic priests that were known to be
Catholic bishops at that
time, all of whom
were Latin Rite, R-I-T-E, were celibate clergy, were priests who were not
married. Priests came from
Ukraine with wives, with
families, with children. It was one of the sources of tension and
misunderstanding and difficulty
between the Eastern Catholics
from Ukraine and the Roman Catholic bishops, whether they were Irish or French
or
German, as they were at that
time. The other custom was that the real estate, that the property of the
parish church back
home in Ukraine was very much
the property of the parishioners. That was not only novel, that was totally
unacceptable
to the Roman Catholic bishops
who during the 19thCentury, the 1800s, had struggled mightily against that kind of idea
which existed in Roman Catholic
parishes, and had been totally outlawed, and the parishes in a Roman Catholic diocese
are the property of the Bishop who is a corporation sole.
Q. Now, what was the feelings
among the early immigrants with regards to their ethnicity?
A. That was confused
because they came from the Russian Empire. The Ellis Island bureaucrats were
not well versed in
Eastern European
history, nationality, ethnicity, and would typically put down as nationality
for anyone from any part of
the Russian Empire,
which at that point included parts of Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine, as
Russian. So, the first
encounter that many
Ukrainian immigrants had in the United States was with an American bureaucrat
who told them they
were Russians. Then the
Russian Orthodox clergy here were very anxious to include these new immigrants
in their –
among their parishioners, so they told them that they were, of course, Russian, just speaking bad Russian, and invited
them to their parishes.
There were any number of agents and agencies that were funded by is not unfair to say -- funded
by Russian authorities
to persuade all of these people from Eastern Europe that they were, indeed,
some variety of
Russian.
Q. Now, did any specific events occur in the second decade of the 20th
Century which caused the creation of Ukrainian
churches?
Q. Second decade.
A. Second decade. As the Roman Catholic Latin Rite bishops became
aware of this immigration and begrudgingly and
unsympathetically recognized them as fellow Catholics, they also proceeded with in the person of Bishop Ortynksy to
begin to implement a
policy of the title to church property, to parishes, churches, parish churches,
being turned over to the
Bishop. They also informally but
very strenuously throughout the '20s made it clear that a married clergy was
unacceptable, and finally at the
end of the '20s persuaded Rome to issue a decree outlawing a married clergy
among the
Eastern Catholics in the United
States. Between those two issues, the alienating of the property from the
parishioners who
had bought it, had put up the
church with their own sweat equity and money and mortgages, and telling them
that they
could not have a tradition which
was now 300 and some years old of having their own Catholic married priest,
many
parishes left Catholic unity,
left communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and sought the protection and
support of an
Orthodox Bishop. That was a
massive movement in the '20s.
Q. Now --
A. And into the '30s.
Q. With regards to the period of time of 1915, 1918, 1920, did
independent Ukraine Orthodox churches develop in the United
States?
A. Absolutely. The uniat,
the disaffected Eastern Catholic Ukrainian parish, would announce itself
independent of any Roman
Catholic Episcopal
supervision, and until it had negotiated with some Bishop, because they were
not anxious to go under,
many of those Ukrainian
parishes had a national self-awareness, thought of themselves clearly as
Ukrainians, not Russians
or some other
nationality, were not anxious to submit
to a Russian Orthodox Bishop, and so led an independent parish
life for a number of
years.
Q. Now, leaving the development
in the United States here temporarily aside, during World War I, immediately
after World
War I, did any events
develop in Ukraine that gave rise to the development of a Ukrainian Orthodox
Church?
A. Of course. As the
chaos of World War I engulfed the Russian Empire, and as Czar Nicholas the II's
bad policies brought
disaster and chaos to
the Russian Empire finally resulting in his abdication, with the coming of the
provisional government
for a few months in
1918, and then the October coup by the Bolsheviks, chaos reigned throughout the
Russian Empire.
And part of what
happened was that, going back to what I've said about a growing sense of
self-awareness and nationality
identity, both Ukraine and Belarus
separated from the Empire and declared themselves independent states, and then
again
to refer to this Orthodox
canonical notion that an independent state is entitled to its own
autocephalous, self-headed,
independent, self-governing
church, both Ukraine and Belarus set up orthodox autocephalous churches. But again, the
imperial reflex was very strong.
Russian Orthodox bishops were not willing to cooperate or support these
independent
moves in any way. And so,
finally, in the early '20s, the nationally self-conscious Ukrainian clergy,
Ukrainian Orthodox
priests, resorted to a policy, a
canonical procedure that went back to the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt
of centuries
before, and said in the case of emergency, when there is
no other option, priests may ordain bishops, priests may create
bishops through priestly ordination. And that is what happened in Ukraine.
Q. And was that --
A. That was in 1921.
Q. October 14th?
A. Yes.
Q. Now,
when this church was created in Ukraine, an Autocephalous Church, the term
autocephalous, what did that mean?
P.97 A. Greek words, auto is self, cephaly is head. Means that
literally says that the Church is self-headed. What interpretation has
been given to the word is that
an autocephalous church has a chief bishop, a Primate. His title may be
Archbishop, his
title may be Metropolitan, his
title may be Patriarch. Typically it is Metropolitan or Patriarch, and there is
no one above that
Primate. There is no higher
instance. That church is totally independent and self-governing.
(TO BE CONTINUED)