The metropolitan bishop is — ex officio — the Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
[1] The ecclesiastical province dates back to 988 AD when a metropolis was established by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople after the conversion of the Grand Prince of Kiev — Vladimir the Great.
Some clergy refused to subscribe to the articles of union and continued with the old rites and their allegiance to the Ecumenical Patriarch.
More than 25 years of struggles within parishes for possession of church buildings and monasteries ensued.
In 1620, the patriarch of Jerusalem — Theophanes III — entrenched the schism by establishing an "Exarchate of Ukraine" for those dissenting clergy and laity who refused to conform to the union.
The Ruthenian Uniate Church (Greek Catholic) continued the succession of metropolitans in the lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
In 1807, Pope Pius VII authorised the metropolitan to administer the vacant see of Kiev on the basis of the Eparchy of Lviv.
In 1969, Pope John XXIII raised the metropolitan to the newly created rank of Major Archbishop, with rights equivalent to those of a Patriarch.
The position was not so named however, in order not to provoke a new wave of repressions against the Catacomb Church in Ukraine and to avoid hampering ecumenical dialogue with the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Following the collapse of Soviet Union, the Major Archbishop returned to his archepiscopal see in Lviv.
The title of the suppressed Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Kamyanets was united with it on 6 December 2004.