“The pandemic was a trigger to bring us more into the digital world, allowing us to go beyond our borders,” Bubnevych said.
‘We have a lot of things to share’
“I will go to the synod to share the excellence of what is happening in Albuquerque. It is unique and healthy, and we have a lot of things to share. I am so pleased to be a voice to priests from all over the world,” Bubnevych said.
The meeting, he said, may resemble “Hungarian goulash soup, where everybody contributes something to simmer in the pot. It is going to be very intense.”
Born in 1975 in Ukraine, Bubnevych received an advanced theological degree from the International Theological Institute in Austria in 2001 and taught English at a seminary. He was ordained in 2014 in Phoenix, and in 2015 he was assigned to his New Mexico parish.
Bubnevych said that while living in the U.S. he has learned local customs and how the Catholic faith is lived here.
“Our Church in Ukraine is ethnic,” he said, “and it was persecuted. The Soviet Union did a lot of damage. Our Church has the unique experience of coming out from the underground and assimilated practices from the Roman rite.”
“Here in the U.S., we’re very sensitive about adopting practices of the Latin rite. But in Ukraine, First Fridays, divine mercy, and other Western practices were adopted, and we were very happy about it. Here it is more specifically Eastern. It is a Church for all people; people who are attracted to our spirituality and Byzantine liturgy.”
“Faith in the U.S. is always questioned; you’ve got to defend it and explain it. In Ukraine, people just take it for granted,” Bubnevych said.
He said his Byzantine rite may be uniquely able to work in the U.S. environment, having been persecuted by communism and many of its properties seized by the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and never returned after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Before our seminary was reopened, the older priests taught seminarians from their notes because their books had been seized,” he said. Byzantine-rite priests and faithful were imprisoned and murdered by the Soviets.
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“Our spirituality is very challenging and presents a challenge to the world that is very secularized and has a crisis of vocations and morality. There is a challenge to the truth and how to live it. Our Church, by the way it preserved its calendar and its liturgy without a lot of changes, is a deep source of nourishment and faith,” Bubnevych said.
At the conference, he said, “I will put the Divine Liturgy on the table, which is a continuous call to repentance and [to] evangelize the world. The change we experience through the mystery of Christ’s cross and death: the Divine Liturgy and the beauty of its celebration is what attracts people to our church, the singing and the reverence.”
“It’s important to be a welcoming Church that remains faithful to the teachings of the primitive Church,” he continued. “Our liturgy was founded by the fathers of the Church Sts. Basil and John Chrysostom.”
When asked how outsiders may be attracted to the Catholic faith as practiced in the Byzantine tradition, Bubnevych said: “There is a uniqueness in our parishes in the Southwest. In our parish, out of 100 families, only three are of Slavic ethnicity. Most of the families come from Roman-rite parishes, Protestant, evangelical, and Orthodox churches, or even no faith. They were all invited by other families to come and see. There are families with many children; we have a thriving youth group, and catechism that attracts more families. We invite people to come and see and then journey together.”
“We were able to grow a lot after the [COVID] pandemic because we stayed open when the Latin-rite was very cautious and closed a lot of churches here. We received around 20 families during and after the pandemic in 2020. The pandemic revealed a lot of things and presented a lot of challenges, but it was also a time of growth,” he said.
Martin Barillas is a writer and translator, having once served as a U.S. diplomat in Europe and South America. A lifelong Catholic, he resides in Michigan with his wife Alice and their four children and grandchild. He has written on a variety of topics, including human rights, politics and religion. He is also a novelist.