For the Good of the Christian World

The consecration of the Roman Catholic Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross took place recently in the town of Fastiv (Kyiv oblast), and attending the ceremony were numerous clergymen, monks, and local authorities. The church’s history dates from the sixteenth century. Historical records show that Bishop Yosyp Vereshchynsky of Kyiv built the first Catholic church there in 1593. In this article I will be examining the role of this dynamic religious and public figure, and writer, who occupies a definite place in Ukrainian history and the works of numerous historians both in Ukraine and abroad.

Yosyp Vereshchynsky was a Ukrainian aristocrat, born in 1533 in the province of Chelm [Kholm], not far from Zbarazh, at the family estate of Wereszczyn, which was then part of the Polish kingdom. His father Andriy was the first Catholic in the old Eastern Orthodox Vereshchynsky family. In Andriy’s mother’s family, Orthodoxy and Catholicism were already intermingled: one of his uncles was a Catholic priest and another, an Orthodox bishop. When Andriy was born, his Orthodox uncle, the bishop, wanted to baptize him into the “Greek faith,” but the Catholic uncle beat him to it and baptized the boy a Catholic. Later, Yosyp Vereshchynsky wrote that his father’s relatives were chagrined that the boy had become a “damned Pole,” although at the time such things did not cause dramatic family rifts (no one would have said something along the lines of Taras Bulba’s horrible declaration, “I begot you. I will kill you”).

And so Yosyp Vereshchynsky was born to a Ukrainian Catholic family “for the good of the Christian world and to the detriment of the heathen scum,” as he would later write “modestly.” He received a theological education and became a Catholic priest. In 1581 he was ordained abbot of the small but well-to-do Catholic monastery of Secechow by the Vistula.

If he had had a different character and lived in a different epoch, he would have most likely left no trace in history. Vereshchynsky, however, lived and worked in the colorful sixteenth century, in the stormy days of the European Reformation and Counterreformation, an age marked by great respect for education and the arts, thriving book publishing, heated public debates, and what may be described as journalism, to use the modern term, and by the consolidation of the Rzeczpospolita, the formation of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and the schism in the Ukrainian Orthodox community (emergence of the Uniate Church). Our hero’s character was hardly suited to a quiet cloistered life restricted to pastoral duties and communicating only with monks and his flock. Thus, as soon as Vereshchynsky was appointed abbot of Secechow Monastery, he immersed himself in military science, much to his own surprise and everyone who knew him. The monastery was surrounded by sturdy walls fitted with artillery pieces. The abbot turned it into a fortress by every fortification standard — and this was just the beginning.

Like many other enlightened individuals of the period, Vereshchynsky indefatigably and generously supported scholarship and art; he was a philanthropist of the Law School of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and helped talented writers. Eventually, he started writing too, mainly on contemporary issues relating to the Polish state and politics. Quite a few of his works deal with didactics and Christianity (e.g., The Science of Virtuous Living for Every Christian King), while in his sermons he described human vices with a touch of humor. We will return to this topic later.

All this eventually drew public and church attention to the modest abbot. In 1589 Vereshchynsky was enthroned bishop and assigned to the Kyivan diocese. This automatically made him a senator of the Rzeczpospolita; the bishop of Kyiv now had a rostrum from which he could address the most influential Poles. Historians believe that Vereshchynsky quickly assessed the situation with the Cossacks, as well as the Polish government’s policy in regard to them. He received considerable information from a Cossack leader, a Pole by the name of Jan Oryszowski, who occasionally succeeded in reconciling the interests of the Crown and the Cossacks. When one of the first large-scale Cossack rebellions, led by Kosynsky, began in the late sixteenth century, Vereshchynsky, unlike most of the Polish nobility, often understood and even justified the insurgents’ actions. Moreover, he was perfectly convinced that the Rzeczpospolita badly needed the Cossacks to protect the kingdom from the Tatars. In his opinion, both the Cossacks and the Tatars were a threat to Poland, but public peace could be secured only with Cossack aid.

Vereshchynsky thoroughly analyzed the situation and decided once and for all that the government had to handle the Cossacks with kid gloves, under any circumstances. The Polish government pursued a different policy; Cossacks were mentioned, reckoned with, and paid only in time of war, when the Polish kingdom was in military danger, e.g., when it was threatened by an invasion of the Crimean Tatars or the Turkish sultan. This is precisely what happened in 1594, when Poland had to be defended against a 100,000- strong Crimean horde. Then reluctance to communicate with the Cossacks was instantly replaced with attempts to seek contact with Cossack leaders. Under the circumstances, Hetman Zolkiewski once again used the Kyiv bishop and his loyal attitude to the Cossacks. It is interesting to note that Vereshchynsky immediately started bargaining for the highest possible pay for the Cossacks. He set about the business of reconciliation with the utmost enthusiasm and even offered to help organize the Cossack host, time and again saying that “the Ukrainian men are prepared to sacrifice their lives to fight the enemy.”

On some occasions, the bishop of Kyiv, despite his age (especially by contemporary standards) would take to the field on horseback together with regular Polish and Cossack troops, and chase Tatars in the steppe (our hero had a dynamic, sensitive nature, and did not resemble so much a cleric as a Cossack; his Orthodox uncle should have been the one to baptize him). Relying on his experience and Cossack contacts, Yosyp Vereshchynsky worked out a theory aimed at solving the Cossack problem that was very closely tied to that of national security: protecting the entire Rzeczpospolita, including Kyiv, from attacks by the steppe nomads. He formulated his ideas in several works, such as “A Method of Populating a New Kyiv and Defending the Former Capital of the Kyiv Principality against Any Danger without Burdening His Royal Majesty and without Incurring Losses on the Polish Crown: Explanations of the Future Krakow Sejm for Messrs. Ambassadors,” etc.

Vereshchynsky, however, concentrated not only on the need to bolster Kyiv’s fortifications, but also on founding schools of Cossack knights in the city. This idea led the author to another one, a large-scale project aimed at establishing a Grand Rus’ Principality within the Rzeczpospolita (e.g., “The Correct Way to Quickly and Easily Populate Desolate Lands in the Rus’ Regions of the Polish Kingdom, and to Defend More Cleverly All Borderlands against the Enemies of the Holy Cross”). Vereshchynsky’s Grand Rus’ Principality was to become the third equal part of the Rzeczpospolita, on a par with Poland and Lithuania (a similar project would be developed by Vyhovsky and Nemyrych one hundred years later).

The Kyivan bishop was not the only one to conceive such an idea. Despite the Catholicization of many influential Ukrainian families who had roots in ancient Rus’, some of their noble members, who controlled the Ukrainian and Belarusian parts of the Rzeczpospolita, dreamed of reviving Kyivan statehood, even if partially. Such ideas, however, remained utopian, especially since they meant nothing to the Cossacks, who remembered nothing of Kyiv Rus’).

Unable to find support for his ideas, the bishop of Kyiv tried to find other ways to protect his motherland. He even sent an eloquent letter to Mehmed III, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, urging him to convert to Christianity and be baptized. This letter led some historians to regard Yosyp Vereshchynsky as shortsighted and childishly naїve.

Another truly reckless project conceived by the indefatigable Vereshchynsky also dealt with possibilities for ridding the Rzeczpospolita of Moslem raids from the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire. This time he wanted to organize an all- Christian crusade that would involve all the Christian countries of Europe, confession notwithstanding (e.g., Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox adherents — although Vereshchynsky had no respect for the Muscovite tsar). It was the Kyivan bishop’s habit to write letters to a number of European rulers, including the German emperor, the king of the Rzeczpospolita, and the Muscovite tsar, inviting them to join the crusade, offering detailed strategic and tactical recommendations, and specifying manpower and munitions. History would show that his idea was not as fantastic as it seemed at the time. Vereshchynsky included his ideas about the crusade in such works as “Sounding the Alarm, or the Beginning of a Holy War against the Turks and Tatars as the Principal Enemies of All Christian Peoples,” “The Dawn for the Emperor of All Christians, the King of Poland, Also for His Majesty the Grand Prince of Muscovy, about the Beginning of a Joint War against the Turks and Tatars,” etc.

The overall impression is that the bishop of Kyiv did not attach the highest priority to spiritual duty; he was extremely busy designing an alliance of European polities against the Turks, setting up a knightly Cossack order on the left bank of the Dnipro River, improving relations between the Cossacks and the Polish Crown, composing topical booklets, and actively corresponding “with the whole world.” And well he might, because Cossack leader Jan Oryszowski would recall Bishop Yosyp’s intention to turn the ancient Orthodox cathedral of Saint Sophia into a Catholic church. Fortunately, Vereshchynsky did not have time to tamper with the cathedral in Kyiv (his successor Bishop Krzysztof Kazimirski found the wooden Dominican cathedral in Kyiv where it had stood even before Vereshchynsky’s arrival).

Vereshchynsky chose Fastiv for his episcopal residence, an estate that was transferred to the Catholic bishops in 1560. There, with great taste and expertise, he built a fortified castle and a cathedral (mentioned at the beginning of the article), and, of course, a well-equipped print shop. Fastiv was renamed Novy Vereshchyn (not for long) as a reminder of the ancestral mansion of Bishop Yosyp Vereshchynsky of Kyiv. He died in 1599.

For this article the author consulted essays by the historians N. Yakovenko, A. Storozhenko, and P. Sas.