The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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who had been educated in Jesuit schools and couldfightfire withfire began
revitalizing the faith, in essence leading a confessionalization movement for Ruth-
enian Orthodoxy. Metropolitan Peter Mohyla led the way; in 1632 he founded a
school of Orthodox higher education on the model of Jesuit schools (the Kyiv
Collegium, later named Mohyla Academy); he established a stronger church
administration to supervise and raise the quality of pastoral life; he carried out
visitations to his diocese on the Catholic model; in the vernacular he published a
revised missal (Sluzhebnyk, 1629, 1639), a book of canon law (Nomocanon, 1629),
and a liturgy (Trebnyk, 1646). HisConfession of FaithandCatechism(written in
question–answer form like Catholic catechisms and adopting many Catholic
concepts, such as the seven deadly sins, the cardinal virtues, the theory of purga-
tory), approved by Church Council in 1640, became the standard texts for all the
eastern patriarchates except Russia after 1643; in 1684 Russia’s Patriarch Ioakim
approved the Mohyla catechism for Russian churches, and it remained a standard
text until replaced by Prokopovich’s by the 1740s.
Gradually Orthodoxy won back its legal right to own property and maintain
itself separate from the Uniate Church (1607, 1609, 1632) in Ukrainian lands; the
patriarch of Jerusalem clandestinely visited Kyiv in 1620 to ordain a new metro-
politan, archbishop, and several bishops. Orthodoxy thrived in the Hetmanate in
the second half of the seventeenth century, and Ukrainian and Belarus’an clerics
with their reformed Orthodoxy provided leadership and texts for church reform in
Moscow from the 1630s onward.
Meanwhile, for most of the seventeenth century, the Uniate Church struggled. In
Belarus’an and western Ukrainian lands the Union had been accepted by most
parishes and bishops, but less so in eastern Ukrainian lands. It was legally supported
by the Commonwealth and the Vatican and it owned parishes, but it had not won its
political goals. Uniate Orthodox bishops were never accepted into the Polish-
Lithuanian Senate, nor did Uniate clergy win tax-free status and judicial privileges
parallel to Polish Catholic priests. Its second metropolitan (1613–37), Iosif Ruts’kyi,
paralleled Orthodox Peter Mohyla in a confessionalizing effort to define the Union as
a Church separate from Latin Catholic and Ruthenian Orthodox Churches. He
reorganized the Basilian order of monks (founded in 1615) on the Jesuit model and
worked out a distinctly Uniate ritual. By the late seventeenth century there were about
thirty Basilian monasteries in Ukrainian and Belarus’an lands that provided a corps of
well-educated Uniate bishops. Already in 1623 a new catechism and handbooks for
priests were compiled, but standardization of the faith did not make much progress
until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. By 1670 the Uniates had a
printing press in Vilnius; Bishop of Lviv Iosif Shumlians’kyi published a rule book for
priests in 1687.
Confessionalization succeeded in the eighteenth century. In 1720 the Uniate
Church’s synod in Zamość, like the Catholic Council of Trent and the less
successful efforts of Moscow’s Orthodox Zealots of Piety and Metropolitan
Nikon, agreed upon a standard liturgy that was promptly published and distrib-
uted. The synod put into place mechanisms to improve the training of parish
priests and pastoral instruction for laymen; it established better administrative


422 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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