Uniates
The Uniate Church, alternatively called the Greek Catholic Church, institutionally came into being on 9 October 1596, when the then-metropolitan of Kyiv and many Orthodox bishops from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the state comprising Belarusian and Ukrainian lands, which formed a commonwealth with the Kingdom of Poland) signed an agreement known in history as the Union of Brest (Brest is now a city in Belarus close to the Polish border).
Under the agreement, the signatories pledged allegiance to the pope in Rome and submitted to the jurisdiction of the Holy See. The agreement stipulated that the newly converted Orthodox hierarchs and their flock would retain the Old Church Slavonic language and the Eastern rite in liturgy and religious practices, the Julian (Old Style) calendar, administrative autonomy, as well as married clergy.
On the Belarusian lands, the Uniate Church comprised some three-quarters of the population until 1839, when it was abolished by Russia, which in the second half of the 18th century partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth along with Prussia and Austro-Hungary and came into possession of a larger part of Belarusian and Ukrainian ethnic territories. Uniate believers were administratively converted to Orthodoxy (some of them chose Roman Catholicism), while clergy who refused were exiled to Siberia or interior Russia.
On the Ukrainian lands, under the influence of struggles led by Ukrainian Cossacks with the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth in the 17th century, Orthodoxy was not so eager to surrender its positions to the Uniate Church as in neighboring Belarus. In time, with the exception of Lviv, all leadership positions returned from Uniate to Orthodox clergy.
In 1689, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, loosely connected with the Patriarch of Constantinople, lost its semi-independent status and become linked to Moscow's Orthodox Patriarchate, which began to appoint metropolitans in Kyiv and exert religious, political, and cultural influence on Ukraine.
Russia abolished the Uniate Church in Ukraine in 1839; Uniates formally existed only in the area of western Ukraine controlled by Austro-Hungary. The revival of the Uniate Church in western Ukraine (under Polish control) in the first half of the 20th century was connected with the activities of Greek Catholic Metropolitan Sheptytskyy.
After western Ukraine was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR after World War II, Stalin initiated the so-called Lviv Council in 1946, which voided the 1596 Union of Brest. Ukrainian Uniates were converted to Orthodoxy,
while priest who disagreed ended up in prison or went underground.
During the Gorbachev era of the Soviet Union, underground Ukrainian Catholic Church leaders began to reemerge. In 1989, the Soviet government allowed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to register its parishes. The Uniate leader exiled in Rome -- Metropolitan Myroslav Cardinal Lyubachivskyy -- returned to Ukraine in 1991.
There has been no meaningful revival of the Uniate Church in Belarus in the post-Soviet era. A small group of nationally conscious Belarusian intelligentsia pledged to reestablish the Uniate Church in the early 1990s, advertising it as a "national" church -- that is, independent from Moscow-sponsored Orthodoxy and Warsaw-sponsored Roman Catholicism -- but found only a handful of adherents.
Apart from Ukraine, significant Uniate communities exist among ethnic Ukrainians in Canada, the United States, and Poland.
Copyright (c) 2005. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org
Vatican Plays Uniate
Card-- Fate of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Russia in limbo
by Nadezhda Kevorkova, “Gazeta,” 5 July 2005
RISU - Jul 5/05 - The Vatican renounced a centuries-old attempt to establish in Russia a Russian Catholic church of the Byzantine (Orthodox) rite. The Moscow patriarchate was informed of this by the representative of the Vatican in the capital of Russia, Archbishop Antonio Mennini. At the same time 1,500,000 Ukrainian Uniates [Eastern-rite Catholics] who are citizens of the Russian federation are being deprived of elemental rights of confession of their faith.
The removal of one of the substantial impediments for reconciliation of the Vatican and Moscow: the Vatican has refused to support Russian Uniates (Orthodox believers who recognize the pramacy of the Roman pope). It is they who during the past fifteen years the Moscow patriarchate has considered the Vatican's main instrument in converting Orthodox persons to "latinism."
The Uniate churches were created by the Vatican on territories of all Orthodox churches. In Russia such a structure also existed from 1917 to 1930, and it was resurrected in 1990. The Russian Uniates differ in no way from Orthodox believers except that in the liturgy they commemorate the Roman pope as head of the church.
Last week the official site of the Moscow patriarchate made public excerpts of a letter from the representative of the Holy See to the Russian federation, Archbishop Antonio Mennini. It said that the creation of the exarchate of the Russian Catholic church of Byzantine rite did not have "juridical basis" on the part of the Vatican, and that activists operating in Russia in the name of the exarchate would have "several measures of canonical procedure" applied to them.
Menini's letter reinforced June agreements reached at the time of the visit to Moscow by the chief papal negotiator, Cardinal Walter Kasper. Cardinal Kasper assured the Moscow patriarchate back then that "the Holy See opposes decisively the creation of parallel hierarchical Greek Catholic structures in Russia." At the same time the cardinal indicated that "there are Greek Catholics in Russia, but bishops of the Latin rite should oversee their pastoral care."
Whereas "Russian Uniates," who have become the topic of serious ecclesiastical correspondence, constitute barely a couple of hundred persons and there are no more than 300,000 Catholics in Russia, the Greek Catholics that have been assigned by the cardinal to "Latin care" constitute, by various estimates, from 500,000 to 1,500,000. These are citizens of Russia, living mainly in Siberia, the North, and the Far East, working in the petroleum industry. Ethnically they are western Ukrainians, descendants of exiles of the tsarist and Soviet periods. "They are strong, invigorated, sober, with large families and many children, excellent workers, firm in their western Uniate faith, and dependent on no one. Hitherto they have been able to worship only in their own homes, and priests attend them on great feast days and secretly," Sergei Filatov told “Gazeta”; he is the director of the "Encyclopedia of Religious Life of Russia" project. The pastoral care for this enormous, isolated flock has been worked out by Catholic Bishop Joseph Werth. At his administrative center located in Novosibirsk, “Gazeta” was told that they still have managed to register only three Ukrainian Greek Catholic parishes throughout all of western Siberia, where the flock numbers 400,000 persons (in all of RF five Uniate parishes have been registered). In Surgut, Nizhnevartovsk, Khanty-Mansiisk, Karalyma, and Kopeisk the authorities have refused them registration under any guise. According to workers in the headquarters, it is very difficult to invite priests from Ukraine to Siberia; so far they have managed to bring only two.
"The rights of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church should be protected by the full weight of Russian legislation," Maksim Shevchenko, director of the Center for the Strategic Study of Religion and Politics in the Modern World, told “Gazeta.” "Whereas Russian Uniates are the pure result of proselytism on the part of Rome, Ukrainian Greek Catholics are the representatives of a legal church that united millions of believers in western Ukraine."
"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."
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That is False. True Christianity is NEVER forced.
Core Universal Rights
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