Several rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia were members of this family, including Mohyla's father, Simion Movilă, thus making him a prince.

He started preparing spiritually at his aristocratic home in Rubezhivka near Kyiv, where he also founded a church dedicated to Saint John the New from Suceava.

There he joined Job Boretsky, Zacharias Kopystensky, and Pamvo Berynda, and a group of scholars and Orthodox clerics who promoted ideas of national liberation and cultural self-preservation.

In order to preserve their privileges before the Polish king, the nobility, in great numbers, started to convert from Orthodoxy to Greek and Roman Catholicism.

[8]: 103  The first years as abbot Mohyla showed that he had far-reaching goals to reform not only the monastic life at the Lavra and the Church.

He wanted to strengthen the Orthodox spirituality and enhance the sense of national identity as well as raise the educational level in the country and in all Ruthenian and Romanian lands to equal that in Western Europe.

At the same time, Mohyla significantly improved the print shop at the Lavra where Orthodox books were published not only in Old Slavic but in Latin as well and distributed to various places in eastern Europe.

The school offered a variety of disciplines: Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek, and Polish languages; philosophy; mathematics including geometry; astronomy, music, and history.

Mohyla wanted to preserve the Ukrainian nation's identity that had been experiencing enormous pressure from the Polish and Lithuanian regimes.

[11] A decade earlier, he published his Anthologion in which he emphasized the need for teachers to find unique approaches to each student when teaching since their abilities varied.

He argued that the person has to maintain peace with the neighbors; defend his lands in the times of war; a ruler is not only obligated to issue laws but first of all he should limit his own powers.

Thus by restoring St. Sophia and other monuments, Mohyla, on the one hand, strengthened the Ukrainian Church's position, and on the other, his efforts were a morale booster for the whole country at a times when national unity and independence were at risk.

In his testament, he instructed that all Ruthenian people be literate and all his property be given to the Mohyla collegium which for nearly two centuries remained the only higher education establishment in the Orthodox world.

Even during the lifetime of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, as well as shortly after his death, panegyrics and speeches were created in his honor, which glorified the person and the actions of the hierarch.

Among their authors are printers of the Lavra typography, professors and students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, as well as such famous writers and figures as Protosingel Pamvo Berynda, Hieromonk Tarasii Zemka, Hieromonk Sophronii Pochaskyi, Monk Yosif Kalimon, Bishop Feodosiy Vasylevich-Baevskyi, Archbishop Lazar Baranovych and Hegumen Antony Radyvylovskyi.

In their works, epithets and similes are used to glorify the metropolitan, which include symbolic interpretation of the figures of Mohyla's family coat of arms, analogies with the sun and other natural phenomenas, characters of ancient mythology, various associations with the name, and biblical images and plots.

[1] The Greek Orthodox Church has tended to be more suspicious of Petro Mohyla, some believing him to be too influenced by trends in Roman Catholic theology.