Religion and Identity in the Carpathians [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 87-107]

RELIGION AND IDENTITY
89
Eastern Christian churches, the Orthodox and Greek Catholic. Although
both derive from the same theological base, they are divided along jurisdictional lines that bring to the fore the whole question of the western
Catholic and eastern Orthodox spheres of religious and cultural influence
in Europe. Indeed, the presence of Christianity in the Carpathians, whether
the result of the ninth-century mission of Cyril and Methodius and their
desciples or the post-tenth century arrival of Christian migrants from Kievan
Rus', predates the division between the eastern Orthodox and western
Catholic worlds that began in 1054.2 While the Carpathian region remained
Eastern Christian, it was politically part of Roman Catholic Poland and
Hungary, located along the Orthodox borderlands of those states in an
area that witnessed periodic attempts at church union between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries (Galicia, 1247; Constance, 1414-17; Florence
1439).3
Finally, a qualified success in these unionistic efforts took place in
1596, when at Brest in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, several
Orthodox bishops agreed to enter into union with Rome. The resultant
Uniate Church, as it was known, switched its jurisdictional allegiance from
the Orthodox ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople to the Catholic Pope
in Rome, but it was allowed to retain its Eastern Christian practices, including the liturgy of St. John Chrysostym said in Church Slavonic not
Latin, a married priesthood, and the Julian calendar. The 1596 Union of
Brest that affected lands in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was
followed half a century later by the Union of Uzhorod in 1646, which
affected the lands in the Hungarian Kingdom.4
It should be stressed that the introduction of the union between
1596 and 1646 took on from the outset the negative characteristics of
an all-or-nothing situation. Backed by the Polish and later Hungarian Roman
Catholic hierarchies and secular governments, the Uniates were initially
recognized as the only legal form of Eastern Christianity in the region.
Therefore, the adherents of the "old faith" (stara vira) Orthodoxy were
forced to accept the union or emigrate eastward to Slavic lands under
the control of Muscovy. It was in the Carpathian region, in particular, that
Orthodox adherents with their own hierarchs held out the longest. They
survived until the'late eighteenth century when finally all Carpatho-Rusyn
villages became Uniate or Greek Catholic, as the church came to be officially called in the Austrian Empire which by 1772 had come to control
the whole area.5
It should also be remembered that from the very beginning, local
Orthodox prelates considered the Union of Brest and Union of Uzhorod
to be uncanonical and therefore illegal. And when there were no longer
any local Orthodox hierarchs left in the region, the anathematic views
toward the Uniates/Greek Catholics were maintained by the hierarchy of
the Russian Orthodox Church in Muscovy and later the Russian Empire.