In 988, the baptism of Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kievan Rus’, and all his subjects marked the beginning of the evangelization of the region.
In 1596, at the Union of Brest-Litovsk, the Metropolitan of Kyiv, who followed the Byzantine rite, decided to sever ties with the Church of Constantinople in favor of the Church of Rome: six dioceses in Ukraine entered into communion with Rome while retaining their liturgy, rites, and customs. This marked the official founding of the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine.
In 1945, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was forcibly incorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church: the Metropolitan of Lviv and all the Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops were arrested and sentenced to hard labor. In 1946, a pseudo-synod convened by Stalin—in which no Catholic bishops participated—declared the dissolution of the Greek Catholic Church: 3,000 churches and 150 monasteries were confiscated, and its bishops, priests, and faithful were condemned to exile or forced to go underground. In 1991, His Beatitude Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky, Major Archbishop, returned to Ukraine. The Cathedral of Lviv was returned to the Greek Catholics, along with 900 of the churches that had been assigned by the Soviet regime to the Orthodox or had been closed.
On August 21, 2005, the seat of the major archdiocese was officially transferred from Lviv to Kyiv, the capital. It is currently held by His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk.
There are 5 million Greek Catholics and nearly 1 million Latin Catholics in Ukraine.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine was recognized in 2019 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. It thus became the 15th autocephalous Orthodox Church and has nearly 20 million members.
