Four Hundred Years: Union of Brest (1596-1996). A Critical Re-evaluation ed. by Bert Groen and Wil van den Bercken (review)

126BOOK REVIEWS the texts, reflect the usual concerns of Counter-Reformation prelates for the improvement of church administration and in the quality of the clergy. The next two essays focus on the nineteenth century. One, on Bishop Mancinelli of Caserta (1831-1848), discusses the prelate's spiritual work alongside his administrative activity. The fourth essay, on the bishops of Capua in the 1850's to 1870's, deals with church administration and with the political context of postUnification Italy. The fifth essay is a study of Paolo Manna (1872-1952), a priest noted for his ecumenical and missionary activities and writings. The sixth essay, written on the centennial of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 papal encyclical on the social question, examines its limited effect on the work of the bishops of the Caserta area. The final essay surveys recent studies on Catholicism in southern Italy in the modern era; again, the focus is on the Caserta area, though the selection of the works reviewed is rather haphazard. The volume has no index, no bibliography, and no conclusion. The essays by and large do not go beyond local erudition, and the writing is fairly prolix. References to broader, comparative, or methodological issues are scarce. Some essays do not even seem to have been revised prior to their republication (see, e.g., pp. 118 and 120). Overall, then, the volume is not useful to those not already well versed in its specific topics. TOMMASO ASTARITA Georgetown University Four Hundred Years: Union ofBrest (1596-1996). A Critical Re-evaluation. Edited by Bert Groen and WiI van den Bercken. [Eastern Christian Studies, Volume 1.] (Leuven: Peeters. 1998. Pp. x, 269. BEF 1850 paperback.) This volume, containing nearly all the papers presented at an international congress held at Hernen Castle in the Netherlands in March, 1996, is the first in a series inaugurated by the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Nijmegen. The symposium marked the four hundredth anniversary of the Union of Brest, by which the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kiev, whose Ruthenian jurisdiction roughly encompassed today's Belarus and Ukraine, joined with the Roman Church. Evidently, the two sides had different ecclesiological conceptions and expectations, and the resulting conflict between Orthodox and Uniates (today's Greek-Catholics) continues. Half of the dozen articles in this volume, constituting approximately twothirds of the material, are historical. Sophia Senyk's sensitive, balanced evaluation of the Union makes several often overlooked points, such as the fact that Rome never could (or did) formally approve the much-cited Articles of Union, since it viewed them as purported conditions precedent and therefore unacceptable . She also contends that, contrary to a widespread view, Brest was not a BOOK REVIEWS127 union of Churches, but merely a union of individuals with the Roman Church. In an elegantly written essay, Borys Gudziak details the various synods and documents leading up to the union of 1595- 1596, carefully exploring the different views and motives of the Roman, Greek, and Ruthenian hierarchs. Francis J. Thomson's erudite and meticulously documented study of Meletius Smotritsky untangles the skeins of the life and works of this seventeenth-century Ruthenian churchman and polemicist. He shows how the struggles to reunite the Kievan metropolitanate in the turbulent wake of the Brest Union foundered, in no small part due to Ottoman pressure and the ruinous role of the Cossacks. Cultural context is provided by William R. Veder's concise philological comment on the Catholic and Slavic Orthodox intellectual traditions as seen in the polemics between Lev Krevza and Zacharija Kopystens'kyj, and by Arno Langeler 's essay on Starec Artemij, a sixteenth-century Muscovite defender of Orthodoxy . Springing forward three centuries, AlexeyYudin outlines the history of the Russian pro-Union movement in the first decades of the twentieth century initiated by Metropolitan Andrei (Sheptyts'kyi). The six remaining articles examine the contemporary legacy of the Brest Union. The first two concern the current state of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Bishop Michael Hrynchyshyn calls for an ecumenical ecclesiology that would enable his Church to play a significant role in reuniting the Churches of Rome and Constantinople—a role reportedly endorsed by the Ecumenical Patriarch himself. While critical of a Church that has...