Who Knew?

I just finished reading an article which caught my eye because of my recent engagement with Eastern Orthodoxy (I celebrated Orthodox Easter in the Dummerston Church a week ago - April 24th). The article was in The Christian Century, a magazine I subscribe to and read regularly. It always has interesting articles. This one was by one of my favorite authors, Philip Jenkins, who regulrly writes about the "global church." The article was titled "Byzantine and Catholic," and is about a branch of th Christian Church we hear little about, though perhaps bit more lately - an Eastern European branch which is Byzantine in its culture and liturgy, but Roman Catholic in its allegiance to the Pope. The biggest branch of this tradition is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which has 5 million members. A much smaller branch, but very similar in culture and liturgy, is the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, which in the U.S. is called the Byzantine Catholic Church. This branch has only 400,000 members world-wide, but one of its churches in the U.S., St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in the Greenfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh, is well-known in some circles because it was the church in which Andy Warhol, the artist, grew up. His immigrant family, the Warholas, from Ruthenia, south of the Carpathian mountains in Slovakia, were faithful members of the church, and Warhol himself - who knew this? - was a devout Catholic all his life - in his own way. His life style was anathema to his church, but he went to church regularly, some say every day, especially in his later years. He did not take Communion, but he considered himself a Catholic and visited Pope John II in April, 1980. Some art critics say his art was profoundly affected by the icons he viewed regularly in his childhood, and he produced a lot of "religious art," including over 100 variations on DaVinci's The Last Supper. All this and more is the subject of a current showing at the Brooklyn Museum: Andy Warhol: Revelation (until June, 2022). And of course, we are aware of another "who knew?" feature of Warhol's life, his friendship with artist Jamie Wyeth, which we have seen evidences of in the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, ME. So, we can say, Andy Warhol was a complicated guy!

Andy Warhol's home church in Pittsburgh, PA

Interior of the St. John Chrysostom Church

Scene from the Brooklyn Museum

Warhol's version of The Last Supper

Another scene from the Brooklyn Museum showing: artifacts from Warhol's childhood

Jamie Wyeth's portrait of Andy Warhol (1976)****************************************** Later today we will have a taste of Eastern European culture - we are going to Holyoke, MA to a concert by Dakha-Brakha, a Ukrainian band from Kiev. We are going with John and Cynthia. Should be pretty interesting!!