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The Autocephalous Church of Poland, commonly known as the Polish Orthodox Church, is one of the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Churches in full communion. The church was established in 1924, to accommodate Orthodox Christians of Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian descent in the eastern part of the country, when Poland regained its independence after the First World War.
The establishment of the church was undertaken after the Treaty of Riga left large amount of territory previously under the Russian Empire, as part of the Second Polish Republic. Orthodoxy was widespread in the Belarusian Western Belarus regions and the Ukrainian Volhynia. The loss of ecclestical link due to the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union, left the regional clergy in a crisis moment, and in 1924, the Ecumenical Patriarchate took over establishing several autonomous churches on territories of the new states that were formally wholly or partially part of the Russian Empire (Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland).
During the interbellum, however, the Polish authorities imposed severe restrictions on the church and its clergy. The most famous example, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw was the destroyed. In Volyhnia a total of 190 Orthodox Churches were destroyed and a further 150 converted to Roman Catholicism. Several court hearings against the Pochayiv Lavra also took place.
After the Second World War most of the ethnically Ukrainian and Belarusian territories were annexed by the Soviet Union, holding up to 80% of the POC's parishes and congregation. These were re-united with the recently re-instated Moscow Patriarchate. In 1948 under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted it the status of autocephaly.
The church is headed by the Metropolitan of Warsaw. It is divided into six dioceses: Warsaw and Bielsk, Białystok and Gdańsk, Łódź and Poznań, Wrocław and Szczecin, Lublin and Chełm, and Przemyśl and Nowy Sącz.
Most of the congregation is still centered in the Eastern borderland regions with considerable Belarusian and Ukrainian minorities. In total, it has approximately 400,000 adherents.
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See also
| Orthodoxy in Europe | |
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| Sovereign states |
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| States with limited recognition | |
| Dependencies and other entities | |
External links
- Polish Orthodox Church, official site
- orthodoxwiki:Church of Poland