Trapped between two churches: Orthodox and Greek‐Catholics in eastern Poland

Abstract

In 1596 the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kiev and All Rus' entered into communion with the Roman Catholic Church, in an arrangement usually called the Union of Brest.! Bishop Dionysius (Zbirujski) of Kholm was among the hierarchs who sealed the act of union, and thus the diocese of Kholm became part of what was originally termed the 'Uniate' Church, and later the Greek-Catholic Church. The faithful of this diocese would have spoken late-medieval Rusyn (the language which philologists today call Ukrainian) in some districts, late-medieval Belarusyn in other districts, and early-modern Polish to some extent. Religious distinctions were more important than ethnic distinctions at the time; people normally identified themselves by their church affiliation. Politically, these faithful were all inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which had resulted from the Jagellonian Union of those two states in 1569: The territory of this diocese was to remain under Polish control until the third partition of Poland in 1795, when the city of Kholm and some of the diocesan territory passed into Austrian hands. After the Congress of Vienna (September 1814-June 1815) the city of Kholm and its diocesan territory became part of what is sometimes called the 'Congress Kingdom' of Poland. The tsar of Russia was also king of Poland under this arrangement, which lasted until the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917. Besides the Kholm diocese in the Congress Kingdom, the partitions of Poland and the Napoleonic wars brought several other Greek-Catholic dioceses under the control of tsarist Russia. The Russian government disapproved of the Greek-Catholic Church, and made strenuous efforts to aggregate the Greek-Catholics to the Russian Orthodox Church. By 1839 the Russian government succeeded in doing this in most of Ukraine and Belarus'.5 The only remaining Greek-Catholic diocese in tsarist territory was the Kholm diocese. In principle Greek-Catholics retain the Eastern Orthodox tradition in matters of spirituality, theology, liturgy and discipline, but in practice the Greek-Catholic Churches have usually been severely romanised or 'latinised' in each of these areas. 6 The Greek-Catholics in the Kholm diocese had endured a heavy dose of this 'latinisation'. By the middle of the nineteenth century the churches did not have iconscreens; the altar tables were fixed to the wall (which makes the processions and incensations that are necessary for the Byzantine liturgical tradition impossible); numerous Roman Catholic devotional practices and liturgical furnishings had been introduced everywhere; and the liturgical texts had been seriously altered in a romanising direction. The churches were furnished with organs, confessionals, and