Brest, Uzhhorod, and the Making of the Greek Catholics

How the Orthodox East Slavs of the Carpathian region became “Greek Catholics” — Byzantine in rite, Roman in communion — through the Union of Brest (1596) and, for the Carpatho-Rusyns proper, the Union of Uzhhorod (1646). This file supplies the ecclesiastical background of St. Alexis Toth’s own world, narrated from within the Orthodox Church but reporting the union’s terms and its defenders in their own words.

Tradition: Carpatho-Rusyn / American Orthodox

The People and Their Church Before the Union

The Carpatho-Rusyns (also called Ruthenians, Rusnaks, Uhro-Rusyns, or Carpatho-Russians) are an East Slavic people of the southern and northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, in a region divided today among Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary (Paul Robert Magocsi, Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America, 4th ed., Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2005, ch. 1; Magocsi and Ivan Pop, eds., Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture, rev. ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, s.v. “Rusyns”). Their Christianity was received in the Byzantine form from the mission of Sts. Cyril and Methodius and its Slavonic aftermath, and for six centuries they were, in rite and communion, Orthodox — the Church of the Byzantine East, worshipping in Church Slavonic, with a married parish clergy (Magocsi, Our People, ch. 1; John H. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, ch. 2).

That this people would one day supply the largest single body of returns to Orthodoxy in American history is intelligible only against what happened to their communion between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Rusyns did not choose in a vacuum in Minneapolis in 1891; they were undoing, on American soil, a union their ancestors had entered in the Old World.

The Union of Brest (1596)

The first and larger union was concluded at Brest (Brest-Litovsk) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1596. A majority of the Orthodox bishops of the Kyivan metropolia, under Metropolitan Michael Rohoza and led by Bishops Ipatii Potii and Kyrylo Terletsky, entered into communion with the See of Rome, accepting the pope’s primacy and the Roman confession of faith while retaining the Byzantine liturgy, Church Slavonic, the Julian calendar, and their married clergy (see The Unia and Brest 1596, the repository’s fuller treatment; Magocsi, Encyclopedia, s.v. “Church, Greek Catholic”). The negotiated terms — Eastern rite preserved, Roman communion accepted — became the template of every subsequent “Uniate” or, in the later and preferred term, Greek Catholic church.

From within the Orthodox Church the assessment of Brest is settled and is stated here without either softening or rancor (METHODOLOGY §4.1): the union was received by the hierarchs who signed it but rejected by a large part of the faithful and clergy, and it is regarded in Orthodox ecclesiology not as a reunion of the Churches but as the detachment of a portion of the Orthodox flock into submission to a papacy whose universal-jurisdiction and infallibility claims the Church had examined and not received (see Orthodoxy vs. Catholicism). It provoked immediate and lasting resistance — the polemics of the Orthodox brotherhoods, the eventual restoration of an Orthodox hierarchy under Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, and centuries of contested loyalty in the borderlands (Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, ch. 2; Magocsi, Encyclopedia, s.v. “Union of Brest”). Accuracy toward the Greek Catholic account of Brest — that it was a genuine reconciliation preserving Eastern integrity — is owed and given; it is not the same as neutrality between the two readings.

The Union of Uzhhorod (1646)

Brest lay to the north and east of the Carpatho-Rusyn heartland. For the Rusyns of the Hungarian Kingdom — the ancestors of Toth and of most who would follow him in America — the decisive act was the later and separate Union of Uzhhorod (Ungvár) in 1646, when sixty-three Orthodox priests of the Mukachevo eparchy, in the castle chapel at Uzhhorod, entered communion with Rome on terms modeled on Brest: the Byzantine rite retained, a married clergy, the free election of their bishop, and equality with the Latin clergy (Magocsi, Our People, ch. 1; Magocsi, Encyclopedia, s.v. “Union of Uzhhorod”; Athanasius B. Pekar, The History of the Church in Carpathian Rus’, trans. Marta Skorupsky, New York: Columbia University Press / East European Monographs, 1992). The union spread only gradually through the Mukachevo and, later, Prešov eparchies over the following century, meeting Orthodox resistance and requiring repeated confirmation (Pekar, History; Magocsi, Encyclopedia, s.v. “Eparchy of Mukachevo”).

The Rusyn of the nineteenth century, then, was heir to a specific ecclesial settlement: he worshipped in the Byzantine rite in Church Slavonic, venerated the same icons and kept the same fasts as the Orthodox, and yet named the pope of Rome in his liturgy and stood in communion with the Latin West. His priest was, characteristically, a married man — often, as in Toth’s family, the son of a priest, a hereditary clerical caste (Magocsi, Our People, ch. 1; Erickson, ch. 2). It is essential to grasp how thin, in lived experience, the line between “Uniate” and “Orthodox” could feel to such a people: the rite was identical, the tradition Byzantine, and the memory of an Orthodox past never wholly erased. This is exactly why the American reversion, when it came, could be experienced as a return rather than a conversion — a point on which the Orthodox and Greek Catholic readings would later divide (see The Historiography).

The Guaranteed Rights and Their Fragility

The unions were sold, and defended, on the promise that Eastern practice would be preserved intact — above all the married priesthood and the Byzantine liturgy. In the Old World, under Habsburg rule, those guarantees largely held: the Greek Catholic eparchies of Mukachevo and Prešov ordained married men, trained them in their own seminaries, and maintained a distinct Rusyn clerical culture (Magocsi, Our People, ch. 1; Pekar, History). Maria Theresa’s recognition of the Greek Catholics and the erection of the Prešov eparchy in 1818 gave the Hungarian Rusyns a settled, if subordinate, ecclesiastical home (Magocsi, Encyclopedia, s.v. “Eparchy of Prešov”).

The fragility of the guarantees appeared only when the Rusyns left that world. Transplanted to the United States — where the Latin hierarchy was Irish- and German-dominated, disciplined by the Council of Trent’s and the American councils’ insistence on clerical celibacy, and bent on assimilating immigrant Catholics into an American Roman mold — the married Eastern priest was not a protected exception but an embarrassment and, to some, a scandal (Erickson, ch. 2; D. Oliver Herbel, Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, ch. on Toth). The rights guaranteed at Brest and Uzhhorod meant one thing in the Carpathians and another in Minnesota. That gap is the fault line along which Toth’s story runs; the next file follows the people across it.

References

Magocsi, Paul Robert. Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America. 4th rev. ed. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2005.
Magocsi, Paul Robert, and Ivan Pop, eds. Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture. Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. (Entries “Rusyns,” “Church, Greek Catholic,” “Union of Brest,” “Union of Uzhhorod,” “Eparchy of Mukachevo,” “Eparchy of Prešov.”)
Pekar, Athanasius B. The History of the Church in Carpathian Rus’. Trans. Marta Skorupsky. New York: East European Monographs / Columbia University Press, 1992.
Erickson, John H. Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Herbel, D. Oliver. Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.