Union of Brest

The closed in Brest in October 1596 Church Union of Brest between the Orthodox bishops of the Polish- Lithuanian state, which were under the Patriarchate of Constantinople Opel, and the Roman Catholic Church is one of the central events of the political and religious history of East Central Europe in the early modern period.

Their initial goal was to protect the orthodoxy in the east of the Rzeczpospolita prior to the claims of the company founded in 1589 the Moscow Patriarchate. The Orthodox bishops retained by the Church Union their traditional liturgy according to the Byzantine rite and an independent ecclesiastical hierarchy. Was maintained Likewise, the Julian calendar.

Part of the believers was not ready to go that route. Not all of the Union's decisions were put into practice what the long term the " Uniate " - so the faithful called now beside the official name Greek Catholic Church - alienated from the Polish-Lithuanian state.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, after the fall of Poland-Lithuania, the Uniates were first then persecuted by the Tsarist authorities of the Russian Empire, by the communist rulers. In the Russian province of Siedlce and Lublin, the Union had to be canceled in 1875, the faithful were forced to convert to the Orthodox Church.

A better position had the Uniate Church, however, in the Austrian division of the territory in 1795 under previous old Rzeczpospolita, the so-called Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. Here, the church continued to exist among the Ukrainian population, and later in the time of the Second Polish Republic ( 1918-1939 ). She became one of the mainstays of the Ukrainian national movement here. After the Second World War, she was forcibly united by the Soviet authorities with the Orthodox Church; Priests and members of religious orders were persecuted and murdered.

After the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church continued to exist in the Diaspora and in the underground, she has awakened since the late 1980s, again with a focus on the Galician area of ​​Ukraine to life. In 2005 moved the head of the Church, Ljubomyr Cardinal Husar, his cathedra from Lviv to Kiev and renamed since been officially certified as " Major Archbishop of Kyiv - Halych ".