oversight of dioceses and parishes and mandated that bishops personally visit and
inspect each parish in a two-year cycle. It mandated that each diocese build a
seminary and that parishes establish schools for religious instruction. Not all of this
was accomplished immediately, but progress was made.
With this energized leadership and definition of the faith, over the course of the
eighteenth century Uniate churches in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania
developed a distinct identity, as Barbara Skinner has shown. They maintained
fundamentally Orthodox belief and practice: they used eastern Orthodox Slavonic
language in liturgy and all church books; parish clergy were married; leavened bread
and communion in two kinds were used in the Eucharist. But issues of doctrine also
separated them from the Orthodox: Uniate doctrine accepted thefilioqueand a prayer
for the Pope in the liturgy; it used Latin rite for baptism (sprinkling, not Orthodox
immersion) and delayedfirst holy communion until the child is old enough to receive
instruction (Orthodoxy allows communion at any age). Uniate churches over time
accepted a spoken liturgy as well as the traditionally sung Orthodox version; they
adopted the Catholic Corpus Christi holyday, venerated Latin and new Uniate saints,
and practiced various post-Tridentine Marian devotions. The interior of the church
also came to differ from the Orthodox norm: many Uniate churches abandoned
iconostases, bringing the celebrant in full view of the laity as in Catholic masses; icons
and church paintings were done in post-Renaissance naturalistic style, sometimes even
oil on canvas, rather than on wooden boards. They replaced the consecrated altar
covering (antimension) with a Latin-style tabernacle (ciborium), and some even intro-
duced confessional booths and organs in Roman Catholic style.
The Uniate Church thrived in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in the
eighteenth century, although pockets of resistance endured in Right Bank Ukraine.
Uniate clergy were better educated (in Basilian schools or seminaries) than their
Ukrainian Orthodox counterparts,fluent in Latin, Polish, and Slavonic as well as
Ukrainian or Belarus’an vernacular. They were also more socially diverse than
Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox clergy in the eighteenth century, coming from
nobles and townsmen as well as sons of priests. When Russia acquired Left Bank
Ukraine and a strip of Belarus’an territory in 1654–67, it encountered no Uniate
parishes in the Left Bank and forcibly converted Uniates in Belarus’an areas to
Orthodoxy.
When Catherine II acquired in thefirst partition of Poland (1772) extensive
territories and population (including 800,000 Uniates, as well as Catholics and
Jews) in Belarus’, she could not act as cavalierly as her seventeenth-century
predecessors had. In the lead-up to partition, Catherine had styled herself a
defender of religious rights: she and Frederick II of Prussia had pressured the Polish
Parliament to protect the rights of“dissidents”in the Commonwealth, that is,
minority religions of Protestantism and Orthodoxy. In 1767 Catherine had spoken
in favor of religious tolerance in herInstruction. After partition, anxious to ward off
interference by the Polish king on behalf of Catholics, she initially pursued a more
tolerant policy in partitioned Belarus’than Russian Orthodox hierarchs appreci-
ated. She permitted no forced conversions of Uniates; vowing to protect the
religious rights of“Catholics of both rites”(Latin and Uniate), she established a
Maintaining Orthodoxy 423