Wh en Kiril Lakota, the central figure of the award-winning film based on Morris West's bestseller, The Shoes of the Fisherman, was released from the Soviet Gulag and came to Rome, he was elected pope. When Joseph Slipyi (1892-1984), archbishop of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and prototype of Lakota, was released from the Gulag by Nikita Khrushchev in 1963, he came to Rome to proclaim himself patriarch of Kiev and Halych.1 The idea of a Kievan patriarchate under the jurisdiction of Rome first appeared in the 1580s, on the eve of the ecclesiastical union of the Kiev Orthodox metropolitanate with Rome.2 The union was concluded