User:DvDel/Yosyf Semashko

Yosyf Semashko (Йосиф Семашко, Józef Siemaszko, Иосиф Семашко; 25 December 1798 – 23 November 1868) was a Uniate priest and bishop who played a central role in the conversion of the Ruthenian Uniate Church of the western provinces of the Russian empire to Russian Orthodoxy in 1837–1839. Subsequently, he became an archbishop in the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, elevated to the Metropolitan bishop of Vilnius and Lithuania in 1852.

Early life and education
Semashko was born and raised in right-bank Ukraine, in Pavlivka near Illintsi in the Kiev Governorate (now in Vinnytsia Oblast of Ukraine). His father Yosyf (1776–1856) was originally a farmer and trader, then became a Uniate clergyman in 1811. As there were almost no Catholic churches in the region, Semanshko attended Orthodox services more often than Catholic in his childhood. His mother tongue was Ukrainian and he acquired Polish at school. He graduated from the school in Nemyriv, and then from the Catholic Seminary in Vilnius. At the age of 21 he was ordained a Uniate priest.

In 1822, he became an assessor of the Roman Catholic Spiritual College (the church board of administration, responsible for religious affairs for Catholics of both rites) in St. Petersburg, working in the Uniate department of the College. This appointment was influenced by his relatively good command of the Russian language, rare among Uniate clergy at the time. During his stay in Petersburg, he established extensive contacts, including with the head of the department of foreign denominations at the Ministry of Public Education, Grigory Kartashevskiy, and with the Minister of Education, Alexander Shishkov. Delighted by the splendor of the Orthodox churches in the Russian capital, and at the same time alienated from the Roman Catholic clergy, which in his view treated the Uniates in a condescending way, he adopted a Russian identity.

Uniate Church and Synod of Polotsk
After the second and third partitions of Poland, Russia acquired a large Uniate population in Belarus and Ukraine. By the end of Catherine II's reign, roughly half of this population was converted, with 1.5 million Uniate faithful remaining (mostly in Volhynia and Belarus). By the mid-1820s, the Uniates remained a significant religious group, with nearly 1500 parishes and over 75 monasteries of the Basilian Order.

In 1827, Semashko wrote a memorandum advocating for the unification of remaining Uniate parishes in the Russian Empire with the Orthodox Church. The memorandum made the following suggestions:
 * liquidation of two of the existing four Uniate dioceses,
 * subordination of the affairs of the Uniate Church to the Holy Governing Synod,
 * reorganization of the Basilian Order along the Orthodox model: the subordination of monasteries to the bishops of the dioceses in which they were located,
 * creation of schools for children of Uniate clergy not led by Basilians.

The plan was read and enthusiastically approved by Emperor Nicholas I.

Semashko was consecrated bishop of Mstislaw and head of the Belarusian consistory in 1829 and bishop of Lithuania in 1832. He carried out significant reforms in the Greek Catholic Church, which would ultimately lead to its joining the Orthodox Church. He abolished the right of patronage and introduced Orthodox liturgical books from the Moscow Holy Synod press to replace Uniate liturgical books. In Uniate churches, whose appearance and equipment had undergone Latinisation in the previous decades, iconostases, Orthodox utensils, and liturgical vestments were restored. He encouraged the Uniate clergy, who spoke Polish much better than Russian, to abandon their Ruthenian identity (Ukrainian or Belarusian) and adopt Russian.

Semashko worked extensively to monitor the Uniate clergy. In 1834, he personally met with approximately 800 priests over the course of two months. He also kept a notebook containing information on 1200 Uniate priests and 300 monastics. Semashko also utilized his ability to close the parishes of certain clergy who were deemed unreliable and relocate parishioners to nearby ones. Between 1831 and 1836, Russian authorities closed forty-four monasteries suspected of supporting Polish rebels and nearly all Basilian schools.

In 1835, Semashko was invited to join a secret government committee charged with bringing about the unification of the Uniate and Orthodox Church. The committee included Minister of Interior Affairs Dmitry Bludov, Procurator of the Holy Synod Stepan Nechaev, Moscow Metropolitan Filaret, Uniate Metropolitan Josaphat Bulhak, Semashko, and several other government officials and Orthodox clerics. The complicated situation on the ground, in which numerous Uniates and Roman Catholics were protesting against the transformation of Uniate churches, quickly led to disagreements within the committee. To overcome this, Bludov asked the emperor to create an even smaller top-secret sub-committee of four people: Semashko, Bludov, Filaret, and Nechaev. Among the Orthodox hierarchs, only Filaret knew about Semashko's plan in its entirety, while others were largely kept in the dark. In the end, this smaller group oversaw all the important steps in the process of preparing for the reunification of February 1839. As a crucial step, in 1837 Semashko's old idea of subordinating the Uniate church to the Orthodox Synod, which the tsar had approved in 1832, was implemented. The church was subordinated directly to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who was a secular official rather than a cleric.

In 1838 the formal head of the Uniate Church, Metropolitan Josaphat Bulhak died of natural causes, leaving the church hierarchy entirely in the hands of Semashko and his adepts. By the end of the year, Semashko had already submitted a memorandum arguing for starting the reunion, and the Orthodox metropolitans of Moscow and Kyiv quickly agreed. With the help of the authorities, Semashko collected 1,305 statements from Uniate priests declaring their willingness to join the Orthodox church; yet, despite the threats of arrests and exile, 593 priests refused to sign the statement. On 12 February 1839, the Uniate clergy gathered in Polotsk. The meeting, known as the Synod of Polotsk, adopted the Act of Reunion and issued an appeal to the tsar (prepared by Semashko) that would result in the transfer of 1,600 Uniate parishes and the incorporation of 1.5 million parishioners into the body of imperial Orthodoxy.

Afterward, Semashko declared of himself, "The Lord, having chosen his instrument for the completion of this noble deed, animated him with insuperable fervor and gave him powers to overcome all obstacles."

Orthodox Hierarch
On April 11, 1839, the Greek Catholic Ecclesiastical Collegium was renamed the Belarus-Lithuanian Ecclesiastical Collegium, with Semashko elevated to the rank of Archbishop (of Vilnius and Lithuania) and appointed the Chairman of the Collegium. In his drive to enforce decisions of the Synod of Polotsk, Semashko relied mainly on persuasion and manipulation against the clergy and parishioners, but he did not hesitate to utilize administrative and police repressions against those Uniates who refused to comply. He confined the reluctant Basilians to a specially created prison monastery in Kursk (it existed until 1842), other priests indicated by him were deprived of parishes, and some were deported.

In 1847, Semashko became a member of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church. In 1852, he was elevated to the rank of metropolitan. This was a rare case of the elevation of a bishop in a provincial seat to the rank of metropolitan.

With the death of Nicholas I, Semashko's influence in the Holy Synod diminished, but he remained active in his struggle against the Catholic Church in the Western Krai. In February 1859, through the Procurator of the Holy Synod, he sent a note to Emperor Alexander II about the undesirable consequences of the conciliatory policy towards the Poles and Latin propaganda in the Western Territory. In 1863, during the Polish uprising, he consistently supported the Imperial government, appealing to the flock to remain faithful to the Russian Tsar and the Orthodox faith.

Semashko died on November 23, 1868 in Vilnius. He was buried in a tomb that he built for himself under the relics of the Martyrs of Vilnius. In his will, he allocated funds to the Imperial Academy of Sciences for the publication of his memoirs. In 1883 his autobiography and a collection of documents associated with his life were published as Zapiski Iosifa, Mitropolita Litovskago (The Notes of Yosyf, Metropolitan of Lithuania, 1883, 3 vols).

Controversies and Legacy
The events of the Synod of Polotsk were met with consternation in the Vatican and in Catholic Europe. Pope Gregory XVI condemned all the bishops who initiated the apostasy and protested to Emperor Nicholas I himself. As the face of the Synod of Polotsk, Semashko's name instantly became notorious in Catholic circles. This notoriety reached its peak in 1845 when a Greek Catholic nun, Mother Makrina Mieczyslavska arrived in Rome with an account of atrocities committed by agents of the Russian tsar and Orthodox church against the Basilian nuns of Minsk. She stated that in 1838 Semashko personally ordered the conversion of the nuns of the convent and subsequently had them imprisoned and tortured. She gave graphic accounts of these events, causing outrage in Paris and Rome, which was amplified by influential Polish emigres in Paris. Although Russian envoys to the Vatican and Semashko himself adamantly denied Mother Makrina's story, it was widely believed and reported to Pope Gregory XVI. Over the course of the following decades, the story of the Nuns of Minsk was reprinted as far as Ireland and North America. In 1923 the Jesuit scholar Fr. Jan Urban wrote a book in which he examined the narrative of Makrina Mieczyslavska and stipulated that it was a fabrication.

Accounts of Semashko's strained family ties were also circulated. In particular, his father Yosyf Sr. continued to perform Uniate liturgy into the 1840s and only adopted Orthodox rite after Semashko transferred him from his old Ukrainian parish to the parish of Dzikuški, close to the Metropolitan seat in Vilnius. It was claimed that this transfer was not entirely voluntary and that Yosyf Sr. never approved of the activities of his famous son.

In the contemporary Belarusian exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Semashko is regarded as a figure of veneration. The year 2018, the 220th anniversary of his birth, was declared to be the year of Metropolitan Yosyf. Moreover, it was stated that proceedings should begin to declare Metropolitan Yosyf a saint of the Belarusian Orthodox Church, though it is unclear at what stage are the proceedings at present. With the end of the Soviet Union and the revival of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and to a lesser extent the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church, interest in the figure of Semashko was rekindled within Uniate circles. Within these circles, and also among Ukrainian scholars in general, Semashko is viewed as a proponent and practitioner of the cultural and religious Russification of the Ruthenian people, and both his goals and his methods are widely decried.