Pratulin Martyrs

The Pratulin Martyrs were thirteen Greek Catholic laymen killed on 24 January 1874 while defending their parish church in the village of Pratulin in Podlasie. The village then lay in the Russian Empire, in lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had been annexed in the partitions of Poland. The dead belonged to the Byzantine-rite Catholic Church, commonly called the Uniate Church, which had entered communion with Rome at the Union of Brest in 1596 while keeping the Slavonic liturgy and the customs of the Kyivan tradition, including a married parish clergy. Imperial policy in the nineteenth century sought to absorb this church into the Russian Orthodox Church, presenting the change as a return of Ruthenians to Orthodoxy. The Uniate hierarchy in the empire proper was suppressed at the Synod of Polotsk in 1839. The Eparchy of Chełm, the last organized Uniate diocese under tsarist rule, came under direct assault after the January Uprising of 1863–1864, when the government removed resistant clergy, altered liturgical books, and used police and soldiers to occupy churches.

In January 1874 officials and troops arrived in Pratulin to install an Orthodox priest and to seize the Uniate church. Parishioners occupied the building and then stood unarmed before it, refusing to hand it over. Later Catholic accounts, including those used in the beatification process, describe the crowd singing hymns and holding a cross. Daniel Karmasz is frequently named as the man who raised the cross; Wincenty Lewoniuk is often named among the leading defenders. The soldiers opened fire. Thirteen men were killed and others were wounded. The Catholic Church identifies the dead as Wincenty Lewoniuk, Daniel Karmasz, Łukasz Bojko, Konstanty Bojko, Jan Andrzejuk, Maksym Hawryluk, Onufry Wasyluk, Bartłomiej Osypiuk, Filip Geryluk, Ignacy Frańczuk, Anicet Hryciuk, Wasyl Martyszuk, and Michał Wawryszuk. All were peasant farmers of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) Greek Catholic background, not clergy and not members of a religious order. They were buried without a Catholic funeral, and the church was taken for Orthodox use.

The shootings at Pratulin formed part of the wider liquidation of the Chełm Eparchy, completed in 1875, after which Uniate public worship was forbidden in the Russian partition and remaining faithful were registered as Orthodox. Similar confrontations occurred in other Podlasie parishes in the same months. Under tsarist rule there could be no public cult. Memory of the thirteen was kept in village and family tradition and among Greek Catholics in Austrian Galicia, where the Uniate Church remained legal. The region’s Greek Catholics were caught between imperial religious policy, which treated them as Russians who must be Orthodox, and a Latin-rite majority; their death was understood by their own community as a refusal to abandon communion with Rome.

The cause of beatification was taken up in the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, especially after the restoration of more open religious life in Poland. Pope John Paul II beatified the thirteen as a group of martyrs on 6 October 1996, judging that they were killed in hatred of the Catholic faith and of the union with Rome. They have not been canonized. Their feast is kept on 24 January. Veneration is centered on Pratulin in present-day eastern Poland, where a shrine associated with the martyrs draws Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Greek Catholic pilgrims. They are remembered as lay witnesses to the Eastern Catholic tradition on a nineteenth-century imperial frontier.