The Views of Prince Kostiantyn Ostroz'kyi
In June 1595, just after the pro-union Orthodox hierarchs issued their second letter of intent and the constitution which outlined their understanding of church union with Rome, Prince Ostroz'kyi issued the following appeal to the people of Rus':
In these days, through the evil and cunning work of the ever-malign devil, the chief leaders of our faith, tempted by the glories of this world and blinded by their desire for pleasures, our faithless pastors, the metropolitan and the bishops, have forsaken our holy patriarchs and gone over to the Latin side....
Changing into wolves they secretly agreed among themselves like the damned, like Judas the Betrayer of Christ with the Jews, to tear away the Orthodox Christians of this region without their knowledge and to drag them down to ruin. Because the majority of the population of this land, particularly the Orthodox Christians, consider me to a certain extent to be a defender of Orthodoxy and because 1 have fear before God and before you, dear brethren, to take any part of the blame on my head, 1 inform you all together and individually that I have determined to stand firmly, in an alliance with you, against these dangerous enemies of our salvation. What can be more shameless, more unjust, than when those six or seven persons, like robbers, plot secretly and forsake our pastors-patriarchs? Without asking us they entangle us in this betrayal, us the Orthodox, like mute curs. Why obey such persons? When the salt has lost its savor it should be cast out and trampled underfoot....source: Ivan Wlasowsky, Outline History of the I'hrainian Orthodox Church, Vol. I (New York and Bound Brook, N.J. 1974), p. 255.
his advisers. It is, in fact, the question of which articles in the 1595 project are ‘not opposed’ to the Catholic faith which has remained a source of conflict between Rome and the Uniate (later, Greek Catholic and then Ukrainian Catholic) church to the present day.
When Bishops Potii and Terlets'kyi returned from Rome, King Zygmunt III, himself an ardent supporter of church union, called upon Poland-Lithuania’s Orthodox hierarchs to convene in the city of Brest, in far southwestern Lithuania, in October 1596. All the hierarchs of the Kievan metropolitanate arrived in Brest in the fall of that year, but they did not meet together. Instead, the pro-union bishops and Metropolitan Rahoza, joined by three Roman Catholic bishops, several Jesuits, and delegates of the king met at the cathedral in Brest, while the Orthodox bishops of L'viv (Balaban) and Przemysl (Mikhail Kopystens'kyi), nine archimandrites, two patriarchal representatives, Prince Ostroz'kyi, and several other princes met in a nearby Protestant church. Each group criticized and excommunicated the other.