Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications) - Softcover

Gudziak has given us a coherent account of the complex process...The apparatus is generous, the production lavish, and the writing, like the layout, spacious and accessible.--Philip Longworth "Slavic and East European Review " Borys Gudziak examines the context of this Greco-Catholic union by discussing the place of the Ruthenian Church within the Orthodox world, and especially its relationship with the Constantinople patriarchate...This book marks a significant advance in our understanding of how societies in east-central Europe, in the zone "between" west and east, responded to the collapse of the Byzantine world and the reformation of Latin Christianity.--Ecclesiastical History

Crisis and Reform is a groundbreaking study that traces the Church history that led to the Union of Brest (1596), in which a majority of Ruthenian eparchies accepted the primacy of the Pope in Rome while retaining their Slavonic-Byzantine rite. Borys Gudziak concentrates specifically on the significance of the Kievan metropolitanate and its struggle both with the Moscow metropolitanate and with the encroachment of Polish Roman Catholicism and Protestantism on Ruthenian spiritual life. He also shows how these tensions, coupled with the aftermath of the visit to Muscovy (1588-1589) of Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople, led to the decision of the Ruthenian hierarchy to move toward union with Rome. Crisis and Reform provides an excellent overview of the ecclesiastical structures in Eastern Slavic lands from their Christianisation to the late sixteenth century. The book also contains maps and illustrations of leading Church figures, polemicists, and sites important to the Union.