Some have asked me how our Greek-Catholic Church came into existence. As I have shared, our Church was established through the missionary activities of priests from Constantinople, namely Cyril and Methodius. Prince Volodymyr embraced Christianity as practiced in Constantinople. In fact the Patriarch of that city appointed the bishops that served our early Church.
The Metropolitan of Kiev-Halych was appointed by Constantinople and fell under the jurisdiction and influence of that patriarchate. It remained within that sphere of influence even after the Great Schism (1054) which separated the Church into two different Churches, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. It was not until the sixteenth century, at a time when the great Reformation (i.e., Protestantism) was taking place in the Western Church, that the relationship between our Church and the Catholic Church changed.
In 1595-1596 the Union of Brest took place. A number of bishops in the region of what is modern Ukraine, Poland and Belarus (“Rus'”), decided to come into union with the Western Church. This was done for two reasons: (1) union with the Bishop of Rome, the See of the Apostle Peter, was how Christ established the Church; and (2) it was a way to avoid being ruled by the newly established Patriarch of Moscow.
At the time, the Church in the area included most Ukrainians and Belarusians, under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The bishops of the Kievan Church met in synod in the city of Brest to compose the union’s 33 articles which were then accepted by the Roman Catholic pope. In Austrian Galicia the church fared well and remains strong to this day, most notably in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
The union was strongly supported by the king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, Sigismund III Vasa, but opposed by some bishops and prominent nobles of Rus’ and perhaps most importantly by the nascent Cossack movement for Ukrainian self-rule. A large area in the southwest of the Rusyn Empire became absorbed by Lithuania and Poland after the destruction of Kievan power by the Tartars. This southwestern part of Rus’ was known as Little Rus’ (in Latin Ruthenia); this is the territory that is present day Ukraine.
An important influence in this process of coming into union with Rome was the arrival of the Jesuits in 1564. The bishops of the Rus’ were stuck between a population converting to Roman Catholicism in the West and a rising Muscovite force in the East. At the synod in Brest six out of eight bishops – including the Metropolitan of Kiev, Michael Ragoza – supported the union. The remaining three bishops from the extreme west of Ukraine and eastern Poland (Lviv, Lutsk, and Przemyśl) did not join the union until 1700, 1702, and 1693 respectively. Our Church’s history is fascinating!