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Polish Orthodox Church / Church of Poland

The ancient Slavonic population of the area covered by modern Poland became Christian over a thousand years ago. The first Orthodox diocese was established in the 10th century. On July 15, 1410, the Polish forces led by Jagiello, together with a great army of Lithuanians, Ruthenians, and Tatars under Witold, gave battle to the Teutonic Order at Grunwald (in Polish Zielone Pole) near Tannenberg in Prussia, and won a great victory. Ulrich von Jungingen, the Grand Master of the Order, was slain with a host of his knights. The immediate results of the last successful campaign were manifested in the Act of Horodlo (October 2, 1413), which consummated and finally confirmed the union of Poland and Lithuania. Those Lithuanian nobles who accepted Catholicism were admitted to the privileges enjoyed by their Polish peers. Possessed of the idea of strengthening Lithuania by the means of a common religion, Witold converted pagan Zmudz to the Catholic faith, founding a bishopric at Miedniki.

In order to free the Ruthenian Orthodox Church from dependence upon Moscow - a subjection that naturally had reacted politically in favor of Muscovite domination in Ruthenia, Witold summoned a Synod of the Orthodox Clergy at Nowogrodek, where it was decided in future to recognise only the authority of the Metropolitan of Kieff and the Patriarch of Constantinople (or Tsarograd, as it was called in Russia). The disaffection among the Ruthenian population of Lithuania was subsequently overcome by the Act of Grodno, which placed the Ruthenian and the Polish nobility on an equal footing and recognised the equal rights and liberties of Polish or Lithuanian Catholics and Orthodox Ruthenians.

In the violent struggles for ascendency between the Roman Catholics and the Dissidents (under which latter title Protestants and members of the Orthodox Church were included), which took place in Poland, Sigismund II (Augustus) (1548-1572), evidently a man of weak character, played an inconsistent part. He was himself in favour of the doctrines of the Reformers ; and, whilst he enjoined the Bishops to put down heresy, he allowed Calvin to dedicate to him one of his works, and Luther his Bible. In 1569, at the Diet of Lublin in Little Poland, a closer political union between Lithuania and Poland was effected; but the union, principally on account of the difference in religion of the two countries, Lithuania belonging to the Orthodox, and Poland, principally, to the Roman Catholic Church, was never at any time cordial.

The Jesuits found in Sigismund III, the elected King of Poland, a zealous patron, and they hoped to meet with better success for the Union of Florence in Russia, than they had found under Ivan IV. Sigismund, although he was bound, by the terms agreed on at Lublin, to protect the Orthodox Greek Church, used all the influence and seductions of the throne to convert the Orthodox nobility in the neighbouring country of Russia, and little by little the nobles yielded to the influence of the Court. Thus a breach was effected between the aristocracy and the masses of the people, the latter being profoundly attached to the Orthodox Greek Church.

Orthodox clergy were subjected to incessant persecutions, and both private and public influence was brought to bear in order to induce them to abandon the Greek, and join the Roman, Church. The few Orthodox Prelates were placed in a difficult position ; as defenders of Orthodoxy they brought upon themselves the enmity of the Government, whilst by the Orthodox masses, because they were unable to protect their flocks and afford them the assistance which they needed, they were accused of lukewarmness.

In 1595 the two Volhynian Bishops, furnished with letters from King Sigismund, applied, professedly in the name of all the Russian Churches, to Pope Clement VIII, seeking reconciliation with the Roman Church, and offering their submission and obedience to the Pope; but only on their own terms; viz. the reservation of the doctrine and practice of the Orthodox Church as to the Filioque clause, and the marriage of the clergy. Union on these terms was eagerly caught at by Rome, Pope Clement returning public thanks for its completion.

The 1596 Union of Brest, for which the Jesuits were mainly responsible, provoked determined resistance from the majority of the nobility in the east of what was then Poland, which limited the spread of the Uniate Church of the Eastern Rite. New monasteries arose and Orthodox brotherhoods were established to defend the indigenous faith. When their churches were commandeered by Uniate priests, the faithful often assembled in unconsecrated buildings to share in the celebration of the Orthodox liturgy.

The Unia was received with the universal murmurs of the Russian people, as a criminal act. Religious confraternities at Lemberg, Vilna and Luck were formed against it. Gideon Balaban Bishop o1 Lemberg, and Constantine, Prince of Ostrog in Volhynia, the Palatine of Kiev, the leaders of the opponents of the Unia, were determined to stand by the faith of their fathers, and the supremacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Prince of Ostrog and the Orthodox party held a Synod, numerously attended of the Orthodox, to which were sent two Exarchs, Nicephorus and Cyril Lucar, by the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Synod refused to accept the terms of the Unia, and passed an anathema on the apostates from the Orthodox Church. The Uniats retaliated with an anathema against the Orthodox.

Thus the Church of Western Russia became broken up into two parts, the Orthodox and the Uniats. The Polish government soon took measures for the more rapid propagation of the Unia, and a violent and long-lasting persecution of the Orthodox clergy set in. Their Bishops were prevented from holding intercourse with their clergy; their Priests dared not show themselves in public, not even to bury their dead ; their monasteries were emptied, the monks expelled; their Churches were farmed to Jews. In Vilna, the Orthodox Churches were converted into inns, and in Mensk the Church lands were given to a Mahometan morgue. Horrible atrocities were perpetrated. Many Priests were baked and roasted alive, or torn in pieces by iron instruments.

The Unia continued for nearly 250 years, and it was the pitfall by which Cyril Lucar was overwhelmed. Uniats, not merely in thousands, but in millions, returned to the Orthodox Church ; but the end of the movement, and the readiness with which the Uniats returned, in their millions, to the Orthodox Church, can only be appreciated through an understanding of the commencement of the movement. It was a political movement, brought about at the time when Roman Catholic Poland had a political importance far superior to that of Orthodox Russia. So that, when, on the first partition of Poland, all of the Western region which had been wrested from it reverted to the sceptre of Catharine II, the Uniats, so soon as they gained toleration, and had liberty to follow the dictates of their own consciences, especially in Volhynia and Podolia, reverted in shoals to the Orthodox Church. And, as they had all along held at heart its doctrines, and only professed the supremacy of the Pope of Rome, all that was required of them was that they should abjure the supremacy of the Pope.

In 1918 an independent Polish state came into being once more and the metropolitan of the Polish Orthodox Church endeavoured to secure autocephalous status for the church. This was achieved in 1924 through the Ecumenical Patriarchate; autocephaly was proclaimed officially in Poland in 1925 and was recognized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1948.

The period between the two world wars was accompanied by a number of difficulties for the Orthodox population. With the consent of the Polish state authorities, the Roman Catholic Church seized part of the properties belonging to the Orthodox Church. When the eastern border of the country was altered after the second world war, a large tract of the country with its Orthodox population became Soviet territory and came once again under the Russian Orthodox Church. Consequently the number of the Orthodox in the People's Republic of Poland shrank from 5-6 million to less than half a million. After the democratic changes in the country in 1991 a special law on the relations between the state and the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church was passed. It guarantees equal rights for the church and makes it possible to establish work in the army and to recover church properties. Relations with the Roman Catholic Church in Poland remain tense, despite the new ecumenical climate.