Poland, Orthodox Church of

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The Polish Orthodox Church takes its origins from two chief periods of establish­ment; the first in the 10th century, and the second revival after the political union of Lithuania and Poland in the 14th century. Its history and development have been closely bound up with the ebb and flow of the religious affiliations of the rulers of the area, the proximity and great influence of Russia, and the ascendancy of Catholicism. When the nation of Poland was politically dismembered in 1722, its Orthodox popula­tion was absorbed by the Russian church. When the country was reconstituted as a sovereign independent state after the cessation of World War I in 1918, her new borders contained about 4 million Orthodox faithful, mainly Ukrainians and Belo-Russians who inhabited the eastern part of the country. They had all belonged up to that time to the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Moscow. The Moscow patriarch of that time, St. Tikhon, was willing to grant autonomous status to the Polish church, but the new government, eager for all signs of national independence, was pressing the Pol­ish hierarchy to declare their complete inde­pendence from Russian control by making a declaration of autocephaly. The senior Pol­ish hierarch Archbishop George Yoroshevsky was attempting to resolve the tensions, and pressing towards a more limited autono­mous status in 1923, when he was assassi­nated by a mentally deranged Russian monk who believed the hierarch was leading the Church into schism. The degree of scandal this murder caused occasioned the Polish government to appeal directly to the patri­arch of Constantinople for the award of autocephalous status, and this was granted sui jure by Constantinople in a Tomos of 1924. The Moscow patriarchate did not rec­ognize this situation until the country was subjugated under Russia’s political control once more in 1945 and then, in 1948, the Moscow Patriarch Alexei wrote to the Phanar announcing that the Russian Orthodox Church had itself conferred auto- cephaly upon the Polish Orthodox. The Catholic majority in Poland tended to regard the Orthodox now among them as former Greek rite Catholics (Uniates) who had been pressured to enter the Orthodox Church in the 19th century. Catholic missionary attempts in the prewar years over-zealously tried to persuade the Ortho­dox to come back into union; a process that involved many cases of law suits to claim back churches and buildings, allied with the forcible closures of Orthodox institutions. The heavy-handedness shown in this period extensively soured relations between the Orthodox and the Catholics for generations afterwards. Prior to 1918 the Orthodox had 10 bishops in their synod, 5 dioceses, 15 monasteries, and about 2,000 parishes with 4 million faithful. By 1960 the Orthodox totalled only 4,500 faithful. Today, there are eight dioceses (one provid­ing military chaplains, another supervising Polish Orthodox parishes abroad) with 400 parishes with just over 1 million faith­ful. The senior hierarch of the Polish Orthodox is now known as the Metropoli­tan of Warsaw and All Poland. The church retains very close ecclesiastical links with the Moscow patriarchate.

SEE ALSO: Lithuania, Orthodoxy in; Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Kloczowski, J. (2000) A History of Polish Christi­anity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McGuckin, J. A. (2008) The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Theology and Spiritual Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ramet, P. (1988) Eastern Christianity and Politics in the 20th Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Reddaway, W. F. et al. (ed.) (1950) The Cambridge History of Poland, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowell, S. C. (1994) Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.