The Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church — Polotsk to Galicia

Millions of Belarusians and Ukrainians worshipped in the Byzantine rite while in communion with Rome, an arrangement dating from a union of 1596. In the Russian Empire it was abolished by decree. At the Synod of Polotsk in February 1839, bishops led by Joseph Semashko declared their church reunited with Russian Orthodoxy, and roughly a million and a half people were transferred with a stroke of the pen. The remaining eparchy of Chelm followed in 1875, with resistance in some villages broken by force. What survived did so under Austrian rule in Galicia, where the Greek Catholic Church became not only a church but the institutional backbone of Ukrainian national life. Its clergy the schoolteachers, editors and co-operative organizers of a people who had almost no other leadership. At the turn of the century Andrey Sheptytsky took the metropolitan see of Lviv and began the long tenure that would carry the church through everything the next fifty years brought.