Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate

The Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate (S.S.M.I.) are a religious congregation of women in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. They were founded in 1892 in Lviv, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Ukraine, the first such organization of religious women in this Eastern Catholic Church. The founders were the Blessed Josaphata Hordashevska and the Servant of God, Father Jeremiah Lomnytskyj, O.S.B.M..

The Ukrainian Catholic Church was formed in 1595 through the Union of Brest, when several bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, possibly bowing to pressure from their ruler, the King of Poland, agreed to enter into full communion with the Holy See of Rome. The adherents of this union were a minority within the general Ukrainian population, with strong hostility coming from the adherents of the Orthodox Church. This often led to persecution.

The entire Ukrainian people suffered greatly over the following centuries, as their national boundaries shifted from one era to another. During that time, Ukrainian Catholics retained the traditions of Orthodox Church institutions, of which one was an enclosed religious order as the sole approved option for women who wanted to live a religious lifestyle. They were, however, also in touch with the ecclesiastical developments of Western Europe.

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