The Brotherhood

The Brotherhoods of the Ukrainian Church

Our heritage

When the Lord died on the Cross, Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple who had kept his faith hidden, went to Pilate and asked for His body. Nicodemus came too, bringing about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes. Together they wrapped the Lord's body in linen with the spices and laid Him in a new tomb in a garden (John 19:38–42). At dawn on the first day of the week, the Myrrhbearing Women came to anoint Him. The Church remembers them all together on the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

Christians have counted this work as their own ever since: visiting the sick (Matthew 25:36), standing by the dying, burying the dead (Tobit 1:17), and praying for the departed. From the fifteenth century on, the Orthodox people of Ukraine carried much of it through their church brotherhoods. Our Brotherhood takes its name from St. Joseph and its pattern from them.

A church brotherhood (in Ukrainian, братство) was a society of Orthodox laypeople attached to a church. Its roots reach back to the parish fellowships of the Middle Ages, and brotherhoods as such appeared in Ukraine in the mid-fifteenth century. Each kept its own statute. A new member took an oath, and at the annual meeting the brothers elected their officers, usually four elders, one of them the head. Membership was open to people of every rank, though usually only married men were admitted.

The brotherhoods flourished in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Orthodox Church in Ukraine was under heavy pressure. They stood for the Orthodox faith and for the rights of their people, and they founded schools, presses, hospitals and orphanages. Three are remembered above the rest.

The Lviv Dormition Brotherhood, one of the oldest and most successful, appears in records as early as 1463. Its charter was confirmed by Patriarch Joachim of Antioch in 1586 and by Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople in 1589. It answered to the Patriarch of Constantinople rather than to the local bishop, a privilege called stauropegion. On 8 October 1586 it opened a school, and it went on to build a wide publishing program. Membership dues, book sales, donations and gifts kept up the Dormition Church, the press and the school, as well as orphanages, hospitals and homes for elderly members.

The Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood, founded about 1615, opened its school that same year. In 1620 Hetman Petro Sahaidachny joined it "with the entire Zaporozhian Host." In the early 1630s its school was joined to the school of the Kyiv Caves Monastery to form the Kyiv Mohyla College, later the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

The Lutsk Brotherhood of the Elevation of the Cross, founded in 1617, ran a school and a printing press. It also kept a pomiannyk, a register of the dead, so that the departed would be named in prayer.

The brotherhoods helped the poor and the sick, and some kept hospitals, called shpytali. In Lviv, where Ukrainians were often turned away from Polish hospitals, the brotherhoods founded and kept their own, where the poor and the sick could find care and help with food. These were not hospitals as we know them. They were charitable shelters rather than places of medical treatment, heirs of the church shelters for orphans, the homeless, the aged and the sick that reach back to the days of St. Volodymyr. After the baptism of Rus, the sick, orphans, widows and the poor were the Church's first care, and St. Volodymyr gave a tithe to support churches, monasteries and hospitals.

The brothers also looked after one another. They banded together for mutual protection, with burial benefits for members. Younger brothers ran the hospital and kept order at members' liturgies, christenings and funerals. And registers of the dead, like Lutsk's pomiannyk, kept the names of the departed before God.

East of the Dnipro, new brotherhoods with a narrower focus appeared at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, in towns such as Poltava, Starodub, Lebedyn and Kharkiv. They kept to religious and charitable work. In Sribne, the brotherhood supported a hospital.

Empires were not kind to the brotherhoods. In 1788 the Austrian government dissolved the brotherhoods of Galicia, and the Russian imperial government did not approve of them either. Even so, brotherhoods were organized again in many villages and towns. When Ukrainians settled in the United States and Canada, they formed brotherhoods there too, and in time these joined into associations that grew into mutual-aid and insurance societies.

Our Brotherhood is being formed at St. Michael the Archangel Orthodox Christian Community in Pickens to take up the same work for Orthodox Christians and catechumens of every jurisdiction in Upstate South Carolina:

• When someone is dying, we will help the family reach their own priest first, and another priest when he cannot come.
• We will pray with the family and stay beside them.
• We will help with meals, rides and the practical needs that come with a death.
• We will remember the departed on the third, ninth and fortieth days and at the year.

Until that work begins, if someone you love is dying, please call your own priest.

In time, we hope to offer grants toward funeral expenses. They will be gifts, decided according to need. No one will earn one by paying dues, and a family will not need to belong to the Brotherhood to receive one.

We keep the heart of the old brotherhoods, though not every form. The Holy Mysteries belong to the priest, and we never take his place. The old brotherhoods paid burial benefits to their members; we make no such promise. Dues and gifts support the work and buy no benefit.

Memory eternal.

• Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: Brotherhoods; Hospital; Lviv Dormition Brotherhood; Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood; Lutsk Brotherhood of the Elevation of the Cross.
• George Gajecky, "Church Brotherhoods and Ukrainian Cultural Renewal in the 16th and 17th Centuries" (PDF, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute).
• National Network of Local Philanthropy Development, "The history of charity in Ukraine" (philanthropy.com.ua).