The Union of Brest and the Shape of Return

In October 1596 a synod of Ruthenian Orthodox bishops meeting at Brest, in what is now Belarus, accepted union with the see of Rome while asking to keep their own Byzantine rite, their married clergy and their own canon law intact. The bishops' motive was mixed: some genuinely sought reunion with the wider church after the schism of 1054, others hoped communion with Rome would raise their social standing against the Polish Catholic nobility that already outranked them under the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Rome accepted the terms, and the arrangement became the template most later Eastern Catholic unions have followed rather than a one time exception. Not every Ruthenian bishop or parish accepted the union, and those who refused kept the Orthodox communion the synod had left, so Brest split the Ruthenian church into two bodies using the identical rite rather than converting one whole tradition into another. The church that descends from the accepting bishops became, after further nineteenth and twentieth century upheavals under Russian and then Soviet rule, the body now called the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the largest Eastern Catholic church in the world today. Most other Eastern Catholic churches trace their own communion with Rome to a comparable union synod on the Brest model; the Maronite Church is the standing exception, since its own tradition holds it was never separated from Rome at all rather than reunited to it.