Conversion of Chełm Eparchy

Meanwhile, the religious and cultural revival caused by the Counter-Reformation in Poland drew admiration from many Orthodox priests, who began to consider a transfer of allegiance from the Ottoman-controlled Patriarch of Constantinople to the Pope of Rome.

In 1839, as part of the Tsarist crackdown following the defeat of the November Uprising of 1831, membership in the Eastern Catholic Churches outside Congress Poland was criminalized outright by the Synod of Polotsk.

Another factor affecting the Greek Catholic Church's longevity was its deep roots in the local population, which was deeply intermixed between Poles and Ukrainians.

These Pro-Tsarist clergymen were often intensely disliked by the population of Chełm, and petitions by the laity to the last Greek Catholic Bishop often referred to them as, "Galician wolves".

After having struggled with Tsarist authorities, Greek Catholic Bishop Mikhail Kuzemsky issued a letter of resignation and left Chełm.

[3] Forced conversion to Orthodoxy was preceded by the "purification" the Chełm eparchy of all Latin rituals from the Divine Liturgy, ordered by Popel in October 1873.

Sixty-six native Chełm priests who refused to convert to Orthodoxy fled to Galicia, 74 were exiled to Siberia or imprisoned, and seven died as martyrs.

[4] In Galicia, the forced conversion of Chełm was met with support on the part of the Russophiles and indifference among other segments of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Despite their opposition to Tsarism, Orthodoxy, and local Russophiles, many Galician Ukrainophiles were equally opposed to Liturgical Latinisations within the Byzantine Rite and felt contempt for those who wished to preserve them.

Meanwhile, the local unpopularity of the forced conversion was strong enough that, a generation later, following the religious toleration decree during the Russian Revolution of 1905 which finally allowed Orthodox Christians to legally convert to other religions, 170,000 out of the 450,000 Orthodox in the former Chełm Eparchy had returned to Catholicism by 1908, despite the Russian Government only grudgingly allowing conversion to Catholicism of the Roman Rite.

[4] In 1912 the Imperial authorities created a new Kholm Governorate, split from Congress Poland, to facilitate the continued policy of coercive Russification and the religious conversion of the non-Eastern Orthodox population.

[citation needed] In 1938, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Siedlce chose, following careful investigation, to submit a cause for the beatification of the Greek Catholic Pratulin Martyrs; 13 men and boys who were fatally shot by soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army on January 24, 1874, while nonviolently resisting the Orthodox confiscation of their parish church in the village of Pratulin, Biała Podlaska.