The project is part of the international and interdisciplinary project “The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World. 1945-1958”, which focuses on the post-war period and aims to answer questions about the role of the Vatican in the reconstruction phase after 1945, the emerging conflicts between the capitalist West and the communist East and the decolonization processes in the global South1. The sub-project will examine the policy of the Holy See in the liquidation of the Greek Catholic churches and its consequences in the late Stalinist period. This involves a transnational comparative perspective with a particular focus on the interdependencies in politics and the effects of global trends on the local situation. The plan is to reconstruct the Vatican's diverse involvement, its sources of information and its diplomatic instruments in order to grasp the complex interactions between religious and political aspects. It will also examine the underground practices used on the ground and supported or disapproved of by the Vatican, as well as formal and informal interactions between the Vatican and the communist authorities regarding believers of the dissolved Greek Catholic Church (in particular the Holy See's response to the population exchange in the border areas after the war and Operation Vistula, whose victims included Greek Catholics). One of the main objectives is to reconstruct the image of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet religious policy from the Vatican's perspective.

More about the project:
https://www.maxweberstiftung.de/en/research/projects/the-global-papacy-of-pius-xii.html
https://piusxii.hypotheses.org/viktoriia-serhiienko