The Union of Brest (1596)

Most of the Orthodox bishops of the metropolitanate of Kiev, then inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and under heavy pressure, submitted to Rome at Brest while keeping the Byzantine rite, married clergy and Slavonic services. Two bishops refused, and with them the brotherhoods, most of the monasteries and a great part of the laity, who were left without a hierarchy until one was restored in secret in 1620. The result was two churches using the same rite in the same towns, and four centuries of bitterness. The Orthodox objection has never been to the rite but to the method: a communion joined at the top, by the bishops, over the people, in a jurisdiction where the state rewarded it.