The Union of Brest

The Orthodox bishops of the metropolitanate of Kiev lived under the king of Poland, who, as they put it, was “not of the same religion” (Articles of the Union of Brest articles 10, 12, 15, 25). On 1 June 1595 their metropolitan, Michael Rohoza, and several of his bishops set their names to thirty-three articles that they wanted guaranteed before entering union with the Roman church (Articles of the Union of Brest preamble and article 33). They asked to keep the creed as the Greek fathers taught it, with the Spirit proceeding “from the Father through the Son”, and to keep their liturgy in their own language, communion in both kinds and married priests (Articles of the Union of Brest articles 1–9). They asked that their bishops be chosen only from Ruthenians or Greeks of their own religion, that the metropolitan and bishops sit in the senate, that their churches not be turned into Latin ones, and that none of their faithful be received into the Roman rite (Articles of the Union of Brest articles 10, 12, 15, 25).

Two bishops, Hypatius Potij and Cyril Terletsky, carried the request to Rome (Articles of the Union of Brest preamble and article 33). Before Clement VIII they made a profession of faith and promised obedience to the pope, for themselves and for those who had sent them (Clement VIII, Magnus Dominus in Theiner, vol. 3, pp. 240–243). In the bull Magnus Dominus of 23 December 1595 the pope received the Ruthenian bishops, clergy and people into the Catholic Church and permitted them their rites and ceremonies, so long as these were not opposed to the Catholic faith and did not exclude communion with the Roman church (Clement VIII, Magnus Dominus in Theiner, vol. 3, pp. 244–245). The bull calls their former state the schism of the Greeks and their act a return (Clement VIII, Magnus Dominus in Theiner, vol. 3, pp. 240–243).

The union was proclaimed at a synod at Brest in October 1596 (John Paul II, Letter on the Union of Brest (1995) 1). The pope wrote in January 1597 that the metropolitan and his fellow bishops had ratified there what their envoys had done in Rome, and that some of the Ruthenian bishops had not accepted the union (Clement VIII, letters, in Theiner, Vetera monumenta Poloniae, vol. 3, no. 198 (18 January 1597), pp. 269–270). In June he declared void an excommunication which, he had been told, the patriarch of Constantinople had laid on the Ruthenians who had joined Rome (Clement VIII, letters, in Theiner, Vetera monumenta Poloniae, vol. 3, no. 199 (5 June 1597), pp. 270–271). Prince Konstanty Ostrogski, palatine of Kiev, stayed outside it. In 1605 the pope was still answering his complaint that the bishops had taken the matter to Rome without his knowledge, and his proposal that the patriarchs of Antioch and Constantinople be approached (Clement VIII, letters, in Theiner, Vetera monumenta Poloniae, vol. 3, no. 229 (15 January 1605), pp. 286–287).

John Paul II, writing in 1995 to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, calls the union a restoration of communion with Rome in the line of the Council of Florence, in which the bishops kept their eastern identity and did not pass over to the Latin tradition (John Paul II, Letter on the Union of Brest (1995) 2). The patriarch of Moscow, in a declaration signed with the pope in 2016, holds that “uniatism”, the joining of one community to another by separating it from its own church, is not the way to restore unity, while the communities that arose in this way have the right to exist (Joint Declaration of Francis and Kirill (Havana, 2016) 25).