The Struggle of the Greek-Catholic Priests for the Legal Status of the Ukrainian Language in the Second Polish Republic (1921–1939)
The Struggle of the Greek-Catholic Priests for the Legal Status of the Ukrainian Language in the Second Polish Republic (1921–1939)

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of the research under studies is to reveal the peculiarities of the language policy of Interwar Poland regarding the Ukrainian-speaking population of Eastern Galicia between the two World Wars, as well as to determine the attitude of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) to this issue.The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic clergy has always struggled for its right to keep church records and to issue metric books in Ukrainian. It also upheld the natural persons’ right to have their names and surnames transcribed in compliance with the national tradition, in other words, according to the Ukrainian spelling rules. The above attempts and efforts led to the fact that some Greek-Catholic priests were brought to criminal liability.Based on the analysis of certain normative-legal acts, archive sources and specialized literature, the article under discussion investigates the legislation and judiciary of the Second Polish Republic in the field of language legal relationship. In particular, it carries out a profound analysis of public-legal disputes between the bodies of legislative power on the one hand, and the Greek-Catholic clergy – on the other. The conflict of interests lay in the fact that Polish executive bodies of state power intended to make Greek-Catholic ministers keep parish registers in the Polish language (or Latin), but not in Ukrainian. The Greek-Catholic priests regarded themselves not subject to the jurisdiction of the secular authorities and, consequently, ignored those requirements, which, eventually, resulted in a number of trials. Besides, the article under studies presents the legal position of the prosecutor's office of the Second Polish Republic and that of the Greek-Catholic priests (together with their lawyers) in the above legal conflict.

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