RIFORMARE DOPO TRENTO: IL METROPOLITA DI KYIV YOSYF VELIAMYN-RUTSKY

The period following the Council of Trent was the period of reforms in Christian Europe. Names of Catholic or Protestant reformers are better known from that period, and less known remain the personalities of the Kyiv Church after the 1956 Brest Union with Rome, as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Confederation in which the Byzantine-Slavic rite bishops recognized the primacy of the Pope while retaining their own Eastern rite.

Metropolitan Yosyf Velyamin Rutskyi (1574-1637) became one of the architects of Kyiv's Uniate confessional culture of the 17th-18th centuries, remaining in the shadow of his best-known contemporary, St. Josaphat Kuntsevych. He held the Kyiv cathedra for almost a quarter of a century (1613-1637). During this period he reformed or, more precisely, created the structure of the church in the Tridentine style. Yosyf Velyamin Rutskyi was born into a Calvinist family of Tatar descent and studied in Vilnius, Prague, Würzburg and Rome (Greek College of St. Athanasius). The greatest known reform is the creation of the Basilian Order in 1617, the only Catholic order of the Eastern Rite in the Polish-Lithuanian Confederation. The Basilians became the elite and the main driver of changes in the united metropolis of Kyiv in the 17th-18th centuries.