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The seventeenth century was a period of political and religious turmoil in the
Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. The confessional conflicts produced
martyrs whose cults consolidated the confessional boundaries of the Roman Catholic,
the Orthodox, and the Greek Catholic Church. In my article, I compare three such
saints: Josafat Kuntsevych (1580-1623, Greek Catholic), Afanasiy Filippovych (c.
1595–1648, Orthodox), and Andrzej Bobola (1591-1657, Roman Catholic), who
were martyred in the hands of their Christian neighbours. For material, I use the
hymnographical services composed for the saints. I argue that, in quest of genuine
ecumenism, certain content in these services, such as exclusive concepts of the true
faith and church unity, may actually induce rather than prevent hostility between
the Churches.
Keywords: hymnography, liturgy, Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic,
confessionalization, ecumenism, saint, cult, martyr
Introduction
The seventeenth century was a period of great political, social, and confessional turmoil in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, a multi-ethnic
state that covered large areas of Central Eastern Europe. The religious pluralism of the Polish-Lithuanian society was, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, giving way to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church, which
was being restored after the Protestant Reformation had shaken its foundations in the sixteenth century. The movement of the “religious tectonic
plates” in the Polish-Lithuanian lands also resulted in a division within the
Eastern Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kiev. In 1596, at the Union of Brest,
representatives of the Kievan Metropolitanate proclaimed their loyalty to the
Roman See.1
During the following century, the new Greek Catholic Church........
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