Our Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the largest of the Eastern Catholic churches that are in communion with Rome. Christianity was established among the Ukrainians in 988 by St. Volodymyr and follows the Christianity established by missionaries from Constantinople. It embraces rituals of the Byzantine Church. It also followed Constantinople in the Great Schism of 1054. Temporary reunion with Rome was effected in the mid-15th century. A definitive union was achieved at Brest-Litovsk in 1596, when Metropolitan Michael Ragoza of Kiev and the bishops of Vladimir, Lutsk, Polotsk, Pinsk, and Kholm agreed to join the Roman communion. The treaty guaranteed that the traditional rites be preserved intact. Orthodox Christians did not accept the union peaceably and the bishops of Lviv, Przemysl and the Orthodox Zaporozhian Cossacks actively opposed the Catholics. In 1633 the metropolitanate of Kiev returned to Orthodoxy while Lviv joined the union in 1677, followed by Przemyśl in 1692.

The partition of Poland at the end of the 18th century brought all Ukrainians, except those in the province of Galicia, under Russian control. By 1839 the tsarist government had forcibly returned the Ukrainian Catholics to Orthodoxy. Galicia meanwhile came under the domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in 1807 it was organized into the metropolitanate of Lviv. With the occupation of Galicia by Soviet armies in in 1939, all church activity was suppressed, and the hierarchy was interned. In 1944 the Soviet authorities began to put pressure on the Ukrainian bishops to dissolve the Union of Brest-Litovsk. On their refusal, they were arrested and imprisoned or deported. A spurious synod in 1946 broke the union with Rome and united the Ukrainian Catholics with the Russian Orthodox. Not until December 1989, during the general liberalization of Soviet life, was the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church again made legal.

A great number of Ukrainian Catholics emigrated to the Americas and western Europe between 1880 and 1914 and again after World War II. They are organized into the metropolitanate of Canada, with the sees of Winnipeg (metropolitan see), Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Toronto, and the metropolitanate of the United States with the Metropolitan see of Philadelphia and the eparchies of Stamford, Connecticut, and St. Nicholas of Chicago. There are Ukrainian Greek-Catholic church structures in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, England and Germany.

(To be continued)