Disunion within the Union by Larry Wolff

Author:Larry Wolff [Wolff, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2019-10-23T09:41:26+00:00

Insolent and Malignant Transit

In 1773, at the height of his outrage against the Jesuits, Smohozhevs´kyi also found energy to denounce the activities of certain local Carmelites who were converting Uniates within his diocese to Roman Catholicism. He declared himself “scandalized by these Carmelite fathers, discalced but rich enough”—thus sounding the note of resentment against privilege—and lamented that “they weaken the Church of the Uniates, inflame the Orthodox, and scandalize even the Jews.” 93 The issue of Uniate “transit” to Roman Catholicism was one that came up as well with regard to the Jesuits, not just as a contemporary problem of Uniates passing ex Ritu ad Ritum, but also as an historical reflection upon the seventeenth-century Polish assimilation of the Rusńobility—“so many noble families of the Greek Catholic rite”—with Jesuit schools exercising a certain cultural magnetism upon Uniate boys. It was striking that the Uniate Church in 1773 should have interested itself so acutely in the scandal of “transit” to Roman Catholicism at precisely the time that Russian armies in Ukraine facilitated widespread and ongoing “apostasy” to Orthodoxy. In fact, these issues were perceived as interlocking parts of the same problem, inasmuch as Roman Catholic contempt bred Orthodox contempt, and any pressure from the Roman side was dangerously inflammatory in Russia. For Smohozhevs´kyi in St. Petersburg, the key to preserving the Union within an Orthodox state was to demonstrate the sincerity of its founding compromise. Such demonstration was not simply political in purpose, for compromise was also the key to internal viability and vitality, enabling the Uniate Church to satisfy the ritual and spiritual concerns of its members.

Smohozhevs´kyi had studied in Rome as a young man from 1734 to 1740, and it was there that he acquired not only his richly expressive command of Italian, but also the learned expertise to pronounce upon the fateful importance of the transit issue for the Uniates:

During the time of my stay in Rome, I digested all the material on transit, and I am absolutely persuaded that the ruin of the Catholic religion here continues as the consequence of such insolent and malignant transit. I have spoken and written enough about this, but the singularly Jesuitical arrogance, by means of calumny, has impeded the holy effects of the apostolic prohibition established even in the years 1624, 1636, and 1742. Now is the time that the Holy See should show the world that in fact it desires the integrity of the Greek Catholic rite, that it censures, abhors, and condemns whoever weakens it, derides it, discourages it, and finally whoever, with a thousand arts, under the pretext of sanctity, seeks to extinguish it.94

The specific transgressions of the Carmelites were rhetorically absorbed into the more general malignancy of Jesuitical arrogance, as Smohozhevs´kyi called upon Rome to protect the Uniates by complementing the suppression of the Jesuits with a prohibition against transit. In fact, he managed to obtain at this time the full support of Rome for that prohibition, achieving for his diocese within the Russian Empire that affirmation of Uniate distinctness that was withheld through two centuries in the Commonwealth.

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