Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 9, 1991 TAG: 9102090410
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Frances Stebbins
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Rev. Anthony Ugolnik, professor at a Pennsylvania secular college and a deacon in the Greek Orthodox Church, sees "fallen arches, bone-weary people" for whom "religion sprung up like a lost family feud" as all previous gods and visions fell in ruins.
Ugolnik, who is also an athletic coach and a specialist in medieval literature, painted an exciting but frightening picture for the interfaith Roanoke Valley Ministers Conference earlier this month.
Descended from Byelorussians in a republic near the European border, Ugolnik has traveled to the Soviet Union nearly every year since 1976 and plans to return in April.
As a professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., and entitled to wear the clerical collar of a deacon serving a parish, Ugolnik said he lives in two different worlds in America and Russia.
In America, as a teacher, he said he must be objective about his religion and must place facts before the mysticism so vital to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. This is typical of the free religious atmosphere of the United States, he said.
In Leningrad, where he taught and studied for the 1989-90 academic year, Ugolnik said he was constantly sought for his religious views and for information he could provide about religious life, a concept that is bewildering to many Soviet citizens.
While in the Roanoke Valley, Ugolnik also spoke at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church and for a Hollins College group.
As a clergyman in what was once the state church of the pre-Communist Russia, Ugolnik had mixed views on much-publicized American accounts of mass conversions, Bible distributions and what is sometimes represented as full freedom of worship.
It is inaccurate to compare Soviet Baptists or Jews, for example, with their American counterparts, though this is constantly done by American news people on quick trips to the Soviet Union, he said.
The Soviet mindset and culture transcend denominational labels. And the indifference to God that has prevailed for 70 years will take decades longer to overcome, Ugolnik emphasized.
The major obstacles to genuine Christian growth in the Soviet Union today, he said, are a deep-rooted secularism, living conditions that breed discord and violence, and the still overwhelming power of the state to block a multitude of personal decisions.
This power still covers everything from involuntary sterilization of victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to having to remove buttons from clothes sent to the dry cleaner because they will be stolen by attendants - even if the garment is returned - he said.
Russian Orthodoxy, the branch of Christianity he represents, is rotten with churchmen who kept their jobs under Communism because they sold out their ideals, Ugolnik said. Even some quoted as authoritative reformers by Western commentators and writers have been known to turn in church colleagues to the secret police, he noted.
The black market is still rampant in religious literature. Ugolnik told of a shipment of 10,000 Bibles from Seattle to a Russian city. Only 1,000 were distributed through church channels as intended by the donors. The rest, he said, were quickly stolen and in the coming weeks were sold through what Americans would call flea markets and from backyards for exorbitant prices.
"Never spend your money with private groups that promise to get Bibles and literature in by some dramatic means," Ugolnik said. ". . . Go only with the American Bible Society, the Mennonite Central Committee or your own church group if it has someone on the scene to get the books where you want them to go."
Secularized religion, the result of three generations of systematic church destruction, has left adults 35 to 65 years old in a limbo in which their faith in the state as an ideal has been lost, Ugolnik said.
The "babushkas" - old women who are nicknamed for the head scarves they wear - who tried to maintain loyalty to God and church despite the government have come into their own again.
Along with them, the deacon observed, are a multitude of confused but searching young adults who want their children baptized into a faith they say they cannot understand.
"American Christians cannot imagine folk who confuse Jesus with Moses."
Others, like the young atheist who tried to bribe Ugolnik to perform his wedding because the couple wanted to be in style, reveal a frequent Soviet attitude that money will buy anything.
The recent pitching out of Communist ideology as the way to have a better world has left many Soviets bereft of lasting meaning in life, Ugolnik noted. He warned that in this temporary triumph of extreme secularism, Americans should learn the lesson of not letting their religious institutions and values die.
After his lecture, Ugolnik commented that the apparent weakening of the reform movement in the Soviet Union, which has developed since Ugolnik was there nine months ago, only reinforces his view that free Christianity and Judaism still are far from secure.
by CNB