The Church Union of Orthodox bishops from the territory of the Republic with the Roman Church was concluded in Rome on 23 December 1595, during the pontificate of Clement VIII. Its provisions were announced in Brest on the Bug (then Lithuanian) in the church of St. Nicholas on 9 October 1596. The Brest Union effectively restored the unity of the Church, for which Christ prayed in the Cenacle, on the eve of his death on the cross. At that time, he asked the Father that those who believe in Him be one, following the example of the unity that is in God in the Holy Trinity (cf. Jn 17:21). This divine work, undertaken by the signatories of the Brest Union in a completely free way and for purely religious reasons, was marked by suffering from the very beginning. The very fact of announcing the Brest Union took place in an atmosphere of decisive contestation on the part of the still recent supporters of this idea. The opponents of the Union, led by Prince Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski, supported by Bishop Gedeon Balaban from Lviv, The partitions of Poland in the 18th century significantly worsened the situation of the Uniates. The Russification plans of the Russian tsars assumed the possibility of using the Orthodox Church to implement them. The influence of the Orthodox Church would be much greater by restoring the Uniates to Orthodoxy. Hence, Tsar Nicholas I, implementing the concept of destroying the Union, developed by a former Uniate priest, Father Józef Siemaszko, a specialist in Union matters in St. Petersburg, in 1839 incorporated, administratively, all the Uniate dioceses in his Empire into the Orthodox Church. In the Kingdom of Poland, whose king was the Russian tsar, the only Uniate diocese left was Chełm.
The persecution of the Uniates in this diocese took place according to a scenario developed in St. Petersburg. First, there were orders from the rulers of the diocese, and especially the self-proclaimed administrators in Chełm, obedient to the tsarist authorities, to remove from the Uniate churches everything that was connected with the Latin liturgy, i.e. organs, confessionals, monstrances, bells, etc. - This was associated with Polishness. Tsarist officials, in turn, encouraged the Uniates to voluntarily accept the tsar's religion. Then threats were used and draconian contributions were levied. And when this did not bring the expected results, the "resistant" were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. Finally, they resorted to the use of weapons and murder. A parish - so the persecutors of the Union reasoned - ceased to be Catholic by the very fact of installing a clergyman there who was submissive to the tsarist orders of Russification and pro-Orthodox.
In Pratulin, similar methods were used as in many other Uniate parishes. They wanted to “force” the Uniates to follow the religion of the Tsar. The faithful strongly opposed these attempts. There was an open and public confrontation with Kutanin, the Tsar’s head of the Konstantynów district, who demanded that the Uniates hand over their church to a new parish priest appointed by the government authorities. The people did not agree to a government parish priest. The head gave them a few days to think it over.
He returned to Pratulin on January 24, 1874, with a Cossack sotnia under the command of Colonel Stein, a German Lutheran. Almost the entire parish gathered at the church. The head demanded the keys to open the church and bring in a new parish priest, the anti-Uniate, Father Leontyn Urban. He threatened the gathered with the army, which was positioned just behind the church fence.
The nervous negotiations did not resolve the matter. "Mr. Chief," said Daniel Karmasz, one of the parish authorities, today a blessed Martyr, "when you were taking away our organs, you assured us that the government had no intention of imposing Orthodoxy on us. You said that if anyone ever demanded anything more from us or from our church, then we could all, old and young, take stakes and chase anyone out of the village, even if you yourself were interfering with our faith and church. You yourself taught us and authorized us that today we stand in defense of our church and faith, when you want to impose Orthodoxy on us through the priest and profane the holy church. Today, sir, you are judging your own case and your own words. However, we did not take the stakes that you ordered us to, we prefer to stand and die defenseless, at the holy threshold of our church."
Translated by Google •
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