The 'red hat challenge' for Ukrainian synodality

How will an Eastern Catholic Church navigate both cardinal and a major archbishop?

Pope Francis on Sunday announced the creation of 21 new cardinals, to be formally elevated to the College of Cardinals at a consistory on December 8. 

The pope’s appointments mostly featured leaders from outside traditional power centers in the Church, with several dioceses and archdioceses receiving their first cardinals — and with relatively junior Vatican staffers being added to the list of papal electors. 

Bishop Mykola Bychok of Melbourne, left, and Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk. Credit: Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

The appointments are typical for Pope Francis, who has made it a point to elevate far-flung Churchmen to the close advisory role of cardinals — especially if they have a reputation for a pastoral presence among their people. 

But one appointment to college seems like an especially Francis move — the elevation of a 44-year-old Australian, the Ukrainian Catholic Bishop Mykola Bychok of Melbourne — who is not the major archbishop of his sui iuris Eastern Catholic Church, or even a metropolitan archbishop in the Eastern Catholic Church.

Bychok leads a diocese of 36,000 Catholics, spread across Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania. He reportedly has 10 parishes, 20 priests, and two seminarians. Financial records indicate that in 2023, the central chancery offices has zero full-time employees. Sources in Australia say that’s accurate — that the bishop, who effectively lives on the road like a missionary, works without a secretary.

The bishop reportedly received the news via social media Sunday morning — in the same manner as many Pillar readers, most likely. He called it a “great surprise” and a “great responsibility,” and requested prayers, “so that the Lord may give me the strength to fulfill the vocation entrusted to me by the Holy Church with dignity!” 

Part of the reason why Bychok’s appointment likely came as a surprise is the size of the particular church he leads. Bishop Bychok’s is not the smallest diocese led by a cardinal — Cardinal Giorgio Marengo of Mongolia reportedly leads a flock of fewer than 2,000 people. But Bychok’s entire diocese likely includes fewer people than several parishes in, for example, the Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia, which is not led by a cardinal.

In that sense, the move is typically Francis. Since his second run at creating cardinals, back in 2015, Pope Francis has seen that his selections include bishops from non-metropolitan dioceses. And in 2017, Pope Francis even took the unusual step of appointing an auxiliary bishop in El Salvador to become a cardinal. 

But if there’s one certainty about Pope Francis’ cardinalatial selection, it’s that leading a small diocese isn’t a guarantee of avoiding the red hat — or the call to martyrdom which it symbolizes. In fact, it is increasingly less a surprise that bishops of small places become cardinals, especially if they are regarded as pastors, and especially if they come from places that fit the pontiff’s preference for “peripheries.”

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As to Bychok, though, there is a different factor which makes his appointment surprising even for a Church now accustomed to finding cardinals in tiny South Pacific parishes. 

Bychok is an Eastern Catholic, and he is not the leader of his Eastern Catholic Church. More to the point, his church's head — Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk — is not a cardinal, or even recognized by the Apostolic See as the patriarch of Kyiv.

While there have been calls for several centuries to recognize the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church as Kyiv’s patriarch, and popes have come close a few times, it has never happened. 

In recent years, there was hope among some Ukrainian Catholics that the pope would recognize Shevchuk as a patriarch around the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But — seemingly owing to the pope’s ecumenical ambition regarding Russia — the Ukrainian Catholic leader remains a “major archbishop” rather than, in the eyes of the Vatican, a patriarch.

Amid tension in recent years between Shevchuk and Pope Francis, largely over the pope’s rhetoric on the Ukraine war, Shevchuk is also not a cardinal, while his three most recent predecessors were members of the College of Cardinals.

The pontiff’s decision to name a different Ukrainian Catholic a cardinal suggests that Shevchuk will not become a papal elector during this pontificate.

For some Ukrainian Catholics, this has been taken as a sign of the pope’s ongoing ecumenical overtures toward Moscow’s patriarch, which have frequently been criticized by Ukrainian Catholics. For others, it seems likely the result of the personal tensions between the pontiff and the major archbishop, which have arisen as Shevchuk has urged the pope to greater solidarity with Ukrainian Catholics.

Bychok’s appointment also indicates that Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney is unlikely to become a cardinal in this pontificate, despite his leadership of Australia’s largest diocese, his own pastoral initiatives, and the broad support he enjoys among the Australian episcopate.

Whatever the reasons for it, the pope’s decision puts the bishop-cardinal of Melbourne in an awkward position.

Observers in the Ukrainian Catholic Church describe Bychok as humble, unambitious, and theologically aligned with Shevchuk. Nevertheless, Bychok is now in the position of being subordinate to a bishop pointedly passed over for an office bestowed on him, and — but for the good graces of the two men — that could lead to tension.

Indeed, it has the potential to upset the synodality — the actual synodal governance of Eastern Catholic Churches — of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

While synodality is used these days in the west to describe a kind of prayerfully consultative disposition ahead of decision-making, synodality has a more pragmatic meaning in Eastern Catholic Churches. The Ukrainian Catholic Church is governed deliberatively by its synod of bishops — by the assembly of the Church’s bishops, under the leadership with the major archbishop elected by the synod.

That kind of synodality works when bishops know they are free to speak their peace and that they will be respected, as successors to the apostles, by the Church’s hierarch — and when they are committed to appropriate respect for the position of the hierarch as their Church’s ordinary. 

In short, deliberative synodality works in the context of a healthy hierarchy.

To some extent, Shevchuk recognized that on Sunday, when he said that the Ukrainian Catholic Church would “speak with one heart and one voice to Pope Francis, to the Catholic Church in the world, and to the international community.”

That might be taken as a kind of recognition of the calamitous potential for a Church with both a cardinal and a major archbishop to find itself speaking to the pontiff with more than one voice, or more than one heart.   

While there is reportedly no theological space between Bychok and Shevchuk, the presence of a cardinal in the synod could, in principle, play a spoiler to the health of the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy. 

When the Ukrainian episcopate meets in the synod — unless they address directly the scarlet elephant in the room — it could be awkward for bishops to wonder whose views represent the pope: the hierarch, or the cardinal with the pope’s approbatio of leadership.

And bishops will likely know that when the pope has questions about the Ukrainian Catholic Church, he might well pick up the phone to speak with his new cardinal, rather than his somewhat-embattled patriarch. 

Further, when it eventually comes time for the Ukrainian synod to elect Shevchuk’s successor, Bychok will have to be intentional about protecting the assembly’s freedom of choice, opposing directly any sense that his cardinalatial status is a kind of pontifical thumb on the scale.

Those situations — and probably others — will require Bychok to navigate with a great deal of diplomacy and deference through waters fraught with political and theological complication. 

In practice, the cardinalatial situation seems immediately unlikely to become an issue in the Ukrainian Church, because of the character of Shevchuk and Bychok. But in principle, the potential for ambiguity, tension, or even developing rifts is clear — competing poles of power and influence always have the potential to upset the dynamics of a hierarchy.

In some senses, Pope Francis has expressed a desire to do exactly that — to “shake up” the Church, and to “make a mess” — by virtue of his appointments. In some cases, they’ve led to innovations and greater fraternity. But not always.

There is a reason why customs develop in the Church, and why honors are often conferred according to a hierarchical schematic. Catholics, even bishops, look to understand the leadership and influence structures of the Church, and even to depend upon them for stability. 

When they are upended, the results are never certain.      

In Melbourne, Bychok said his elevation to cardinal was “a privilege granted by Pope Francis to the entire Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Catholic Church in Australia.”

On that front, the new cardinal is right. But a Ukrainian red hat — on a head other than Shevchuk’s — is the sort of privilege that will have to be navigated with diplomacy, humility, and caution.