www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Questions about the Treaty of Brest

I recently read The Treaty of Brest Document (Concerning our reunification with the Latin Church)
Articles Concerning Union With the Roman Church
There are a total of 33 articles, some of which raise questions. I will enumerate but a few, and I will attempt to keep them simple.
Since I will refer to the articles by number I am inserting a link to the Treaty here

Concerning article 5 - Does this mean that Byzantines accept the teaching on purgatory?

Concerning article 7 - Was there a time when Eastern Christians were compelled to take part in processions?

Concerning article 8 - Were Eastern Christians forced to include ceremonies that were not a part of the church?

Concerning article 11 - Was the Metropolitan at one time not allowed to ordain bishops?

Concerning article 15 - Why has this not been enforced?

Concerning article 22 - Did the Roman Church actually forbid the ringing of bells on Good Friday?

Concerning article 23 - Priests were actually forbidden to visit the sick with the Holy Mysteries?

Concerning article 24 - And to hold processions?

Concerning article 25 - This one really bothers me... Were our churches taken away and converted into Roman churches: just like the Communists in Russia did, when they took them away and gave them to others?

I know, I asked more questions than I intended. I do not mean to offend, but to understand history. My thinking, which may be fallacious, is that, for many of these demands to be included in the treaty means that these atrocities had happened in the past/were possibly happening as the treaty was being written. Am I wrong?

Absolutely there are no bells on Good Friday. A wooden clapper is used instead. There is also no consecration of the Holy Eucharist on Good Friday as well.

5-Means what it says--we won't talk about it.

7-They may not have been compelled, but it was actually quite common for Orthodox priests and bishops to participate voluntarily in Latin processions in the Balkans and elsewhere, even to the point of carrying candles in Corpus Christi processions. As David Bentley Hart points out, most of the time it was considered a schism within, not from the Church.

8-Not to my knowledge, but this is a precautionary article.

11-You are reading the article backwards--it is intended to guarantee the ancient custom, and not compel the Ruteni to conform to Roman practice.

15-Because they don't want to enforce it. In any case, this would certainly violate the Church's commitment to freedom of conscience.

22- Yes. It's always the most trivial things that prove the most divisive, because they readily mask deeper issues.

23- Anointing of the Sick is a big deal in the Byzantine Rite, whereas in the Latin rite it was, by this time, limited to the dying (Supreme Unction) and was much more low key.

24- They could certainly interfere with anything not positively guaranteed. As it is, they interfered with a lot of things that were guaranteed--like, oh, ordination of married men to the presbyterate.

25- In Poland after World War II, when Poland annexed what had been parts of Ukraine, many Greek Catholic Churches were forcibly converted to Roman Catholic as part of a "polonization" program. Rome did not intervene to stop it.

Regarding #5, I would say that it means exactly what it says. The fact that what Holy Church teaches on the matter has always been described in diverse ways allows those of us in the Greek Tradition to hold to whatever it is we understand about the process of purification in life and after death.

The teaching of 'Holy Church' should not be seen as synonymous with 'late medieval papal' teaching.

The answer to #5 is also elaborative of Article 1, which provides the theological basis for the entire document (in its most common English translation) as "we should not be compelled to any other creed but that we should remain with that which was handed down to us in the Holy Scriptures, in the Gospel, and in the writings of the holy Greek Doctors...".

I do not see the Church's teaching in that way. But I do ask what the authors of the treaty meant by, "we entrust ourselves to the teaching of the Holy Church

This happened 400+ years after the treaty. Was the Roman Church commiting these crimes in the 1500s? That is my question. (Though the fact that this happened after the treaty is almost worse!

I actually meant World War I. As for the 16th century, it was the period of Cuius regio eius religio: "Whose realm, his religion"; i.e., the country takes on the faith of its ruler. In this case, the King of Poland was Roman Catholic, so the legal precedent would be the suppression of any other faith within his borders, or the subjugation of dissident faiths by law. This was, in fact, the case of the Orthodox who found themselves inside the ever-shifting borders of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. The Orthodox Church had no legal standing; it was subject to heavy taxation; its priests did not enjoy the same legal rights and protections as Catholic priests; and, ultimately, the Orthodox Church existed in Poland only by the sufferance of the Polish throne.

So, the objective of the Kyivan bishops who negotiated the Treaty was to bring their Church under the protecting umbrella of Polish law. Similar protection under the King of Hungary was sought fifty years later by a group of Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox presbyters through Union of Uzhorod, and, in 1701, by some Romanian Orthodox presbyters through the Union of Alba Julia. All wanted the same thing--the kind of legal status and protection that could only be claimed in Catholic countries by the Catholic Church.

Exactly. Many of my fellow Orthodox view the actions of those living then with 21st century glasses. Doesn't work.

I posted this elsewhere, but it's on point here.

Alternative History 101. No Unia.

The "treaty of Brest", settled border questions along the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom's borders with Russia and it allows the Polish-Lithuanian rulers to force all Orthodox believers in their realm to convert to Roman Catholicism. Likewise, in Russia, Catholicism is outlawed and its adherents face a similar fare.

Some years later the Hungarian Princes desire the same and Ungvar is the result. Again, the Orthodox are forced into Roman Catholicism.

The once Orthodox regions have totally lost any memory of eastern Christianity in both nations by the middle of the 19th century.

Many in Austria Hungary have converted to the tolerated Lutheran church in what was to become Slovakia.

Fr. Alex Toth, is recognized at a young age as a talented believer He is educated by the Jesuits in Rome and sent to Minnesota where he works with American Indians along the Canadian border. He becomes Archbishop of Minneapolis upon the death of Archbishop Ireland, much to the consternation of the local Irish community. He becomes the first Slovak American saint when canonized by Pope Francis in 2013 on the 1125th anniversary of the evangelization of the Slavs.

There is no Metropolia, there is no ACROD, there is no UOC-USA. There is no BCC, there is no UGCC.

I suppose the North American Greek Orthodox are happy because there are fewer Slavic immigrant Orthodox to deal with.

The Irish American Catholics are soon overwhelmed in influence in many parts of the American Northeast.

This forum doesn't exist.

Thank guys! This is the kind of input I was looking for! I knew I had to be lacking in my understanding of the circumstances around the authorship of this document...

I think I may save a copy of this post for future reference.

Why would that be? Btw, the middle of the 19th century, most of them outside of Galicia and Hungary were in Orthodox hands. Indeed the nation state of Poland ceased to exist and Lithuania's was totally within the Russian empire.

and none of them got it.

What did Ben Franklin say about liberty and safety?

Uzhhorod might stand out in that eventually-if the areas covered by the dictat of Alba Iulia (the Emperor Leopold just declared the Romanian Orthodox, called "schimatic Vlachs," united) are separate-got the majority of the Orthodox, which the others never did. Uzhhorod, however, in the end did not hold them all.

^If the late-Renaissance Polish or Hugarian rulers had forced the conversion of their Orthodox subjects to Roman Catholicism during the late 16th century, I think it is fair to hypothesize that Eastern Chrstianity within those lands would have been "forgotten" by the masses by the beginning of the rise of nationalism in the mid to late 19th century.

My argument is simple, the Unia, as "execrable" as it was/is in the minds of the/some Orthodox, served to preserve an Eastern Christian ethos and praxis in those regions (albeit admittedly incomplete in Orthodox eyes).

It is absurd to imagine that Rusyns, Ukrainians, Lemkos or Galicians who might have been Roman Catholic for centuries otherwise (no Unia) would have had any reason to schism in America and turn to Orthodoxy.

Hence the "raison d'etre" of the Slavic Aerican jurisdictions as noted would not have been.

I personally believe as well that had the Ruthenians not stood up twice to Rome twice in 20th century America, that the BCC would not be recognizable as an eastern entity by now. The Ukrainians are different because of the nationalism issue, the Rusyn/Ruthenians did not have that to hold them up.

They did, or at least tried to. Their failure to do so doesn't obviate the attempt.

Remember, Met. Sheptytskyi was baptized in the Latin rite of his Polish speaking family.