ATTITUDE OF STATE AUTHORITIES TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH (RCC) IN THE HALYCHYNA REGIONS OF UKRAINE DURING 1965–1991

Abstract

The article deals with various methods of the fight of the Soviet authorities against the Roman Catholic Church in Halychyna regions, namely – Lviv and Ternopil, from 1965 to1988. It included, for instance, the arrest and imprisonment of some priests, the removal of priests for several months from conducting services for violating the current legislation on cults, deregistration of religious communities under various excuses, and closing existing churches: deregistration, and even their destruction.Also, based on archival sources, the article comparatively highlights the number of the RCC clergy in these areas, their transformations, worship (the number of sacred sacraments and rites), the number of active and passive believers in Roman Catholic parishes, their geography, ways of the struggle of the laity of the RCC with various state authorities for the restoration of deregistered parishes and churches, despite the mass atheistic propaganda of society by the communist authorities.It has been analyzed how the gradual process of revival of Roman Catholicism in Ukraine and, in particular, in Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk regions with legal registra- tion of communities and churches of the RCC began in the late 1980s in the Gorbachev era, which testified, on the one hand, to the collapse atheistic and partly repressive struggle of the communist government with community, religion, and on the other – the real penetration of religion freedom into public life.