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Poland The Greek Catholic Church
The Greek Catholic Church (also called the Uniate
Church) was
established in 1596 by the Union of Brest-Litovsk. That
agreement
brought several million Eastern Orthodox Belorussians and
Ukrainians under the authority of the Roman Catholic
Church,
although they preserved Orthodox religious rites. From the
outset, many in the Orthodox Church strongly opposed
Latinization
and what they perceived as the compromise of tradition,
and
conflict between the Greek Catholic Church and both the
Polish
Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church flared
periodically into
the early 1990s. In Poland the tense relations between
proponents
of the Latin and the Greek Catholic rites had relaxed
significantly in the 1980s, although serious issues
remained
unsolved. Among the foremost of those issues was Catholic
occupation of Greek Catholic Church property confiscated
by the
state in the late 1940s.
In 1947 the resettlement of the Ukrainian population
from
southeastern Poland substantially reduced the practice of
Greek
Catholicism in Poland. In 1949 Pope Pius XII appointed
Wyszynski
as the papal delegate to the Greek Catholic congregations
of
Poland. In 1956 Wyszynski named sixteen Ukrainian priests
as the
clerical body of the Greek Catholic Church, and a vicar
general
was also named and installed in Przemysl. In 1981 Glemp
named two
vicars general for Warsaw and Legnica to improve the
church's
ministry to the dispersed Ukrainian Greek Catholic
communities.
Beginning at that time, church administration was divided
into
northern and southern districts. In 1989 the total
membership of
the Greek Catholic Church in Poland was estimated at
300,000,
with eighty-five centers of worship and fifty-five
priests.
Twelve candidates were preparing for the Greek Catholic
priesthood at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1989;
five
monasteries and three orders of nuns were active.
Data as of October 1992
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