Role of greek and catholic church of Transcarpathia in formation of national consciousness of Ukrainian people (1771 – 1867)

The topicality of the proposed problem is determined by the need to develop an effective mechanism for the formation of nationally conscious younger generations of Ukrainian citizens with the involvement of the resources of the Christian church. During the millennial history, the Christian church was a phenomenon of ethnocultural development of Ukrainians.In the conditions of the ethnoconfessional society of the multinational Transcarpathia contributed to the unblocking of Ukrainian consciousness, the Greco-Catholic Church of Transcarpathia was established in the Mukachevo Greek Catholic Diocese, which territorially united Ukrainian lands beyond the Carpathians. The purpose of the article is to investigate the role of the Greek Catholic Church in the formation of the national consciousness of the Transcarpathian population between 1771 and 1867. According to the goal, the tasks were defined: to characterize the socio-historical conditions of the process of the hierarchical registration of the Greek Catholic Church in Transcarpathia in the context of their nation-building significance; to analyze the cultural-educational and organizational-pedagogical activity of the Bishops of Mukachevo. The article is devoted to clarifying the role of the Greek Catholic Church in the formation of national consciousness of Transcarpathian population between 1771 and 1867. It was established that the Greek Catholic Church, thanks to the tireless cultural-educational, organizational and pedagogical activities of the Mukachevo diocese bishops, performed a nation-building role in Transcarpathia. It was discoveredthat the formation of folk schooling in Transcarpathian lands mostly depended on the position of the Mukachevo diocese bishops. The Greek Catholic Church also took care of the public schools, which in the vast majority of cases were parishioners, and of the seminaries in which priests and teachers were trained for the local population. Thanks to the tireless educational, organizational and pedagogical activities of the clergy of the Mukachevo and Presov diocese, the cultural and national life of the Transcarpathian population was identified with the Church Slavonic, and subsequently folk Ruslanguage, which was actively promoted by the Greek Catholic Church. It opposed the attempts to denationalize the Rus population of the region, which did not have its own state and was constantly under pressure of the ruling empires.