Magnus Dominus et laudabilis nimis

The bull tells the story as Rome saw it. The Ruthenian bishops and their people, it says, had not been in communion with the Roman church but followed “the schism of the Greeks”. Their metropolitan Michael and most of his bishops resolved in December 1594 to return, about a hundred and fifty years after the Greeks had been reconciled at the Council of Florence, and sent two bishops, Hypatius and Cyril, to Rome with a letter of June 1595 and the support of King Sigismund of Poland. There the two made the profession of faith prescribed for Greeks and promised obedience to the pope for themselves and for those who had sent them.

The pope then receives and incorporates the metropolitan, the bishops who had signed, and their clergy and people living under the Polish king into the Catholic Church. He permits them all the rites and ceremonies they use according to the Greek fathers in the divine office, the mass and the sacraments, with the proviso “dummodo”: so long as these are not opposed to the truth and teaching of the Catholic faith and do not exclude communion with the Roman church. He gives the two envoys power to absolve the metropolitan and the other bishops on their return. The bull is dated at St Peter’s on the tenth day before the kalends of January 1595, that is, 23 December.

The volume linked here prints, next to the bull, the notarial record of the ceremony of the same day and the professions of faith of the two bishops.