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→Background
The authorities in Poland always tried to make the Orthodox submit to the pope to reunify Christianity. With the arrival of the Jesuits in 1564, pressure on the Orthodox increased. The state of the Ruthenian Church was poor; clergy were uneducated and the bishops were without the funds they needed to properly run the Church. Many priests were ordained without basic training and new rites were developing that were neither Latin nor Greek in their character. Constantinople was now under Muslim rule and Moscow had recently been elevated to a Patriarchate. The Ruthenian bishops were stuck between a population converting to Roman Catholicism on the West and a rising Muscovite force in the East.
At this synod six out of eight Orthodox bishops — including the Metropolitan of Kiev, Michael Ragoza — supported the union, but the remaining three bishops from the extreme west of Ukraine and Eastern eastern Poland (Lviv, Lutsk, and Przemyśl) would not join the union until later (1700, 1702, and 1693 respectively). The Cossack forces of Ukraine felt the Union union was a bretrayal betrayal to the Polish rulers and united with the Russian Empire to fight against Poland and all who supported the Empire, including the Greek-Catholics. In 1620 Patrarch Theophanes II of Jerusalem arrived in Kiev and ordained an Orthodox hierarchy for the Ruthenian Church and thus there emerged a situation of both Orthodox and Eastern Catholic bishops coexisting in the same territory in Ukraine from this point onwards.
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