FRATRES POLONI. — Antitrinitarian, Socinian heretics who existed in Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
When Fausto Socini moved to Poland in 1579, he effectively assumed the direction of the various antitrinitarian conventicles that were widely dispersed there, after having separated in 1562 from the other Protestant “churches,” and organized them into the Ecclesia fratrum Polonorum, with its center at Rakow. There were schools and a printing press specializing in the printing and dissemination of “Unitarian” writings, and an annual synod was held there. The Synod of 1612, attended by approximately four hundred delegates, was the largest: they represented 115 “churches.”
The decline of the F. P. began in 1627, when they were driven from Lublin by popular fury; ten years later, after some fanatical students from Rakow had dared to deface a Cross displayed for public veneration, the Diet of Warsaw ordered the closure of the schools and the printing press of the sect and exiled its leaders. Finally, in 1658, when it became known that the F. P. were maintaining secret relations with the prince of Transylvania, Rakoczi, who had invaded Poland, King John Casimir banished them all from the kingdom. Some went into exile in Transylvania; others in Holland, where they began publishing a Bibliotheca fratrum Polonorum, which opened with a biography of Fausto Socini. The so-called Catechism of Rakow was likewise published in Amsterdam, the work of Samuele Przipkowicz (Przipkowicz), containing the entire body of antitrinitarian doctrines. Another group took refuge in Germany and England. The movement survived the forced diaspora by only a few years, because the F. P. disappeared completely between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the following one.
For their doctrine, V. SOCINI.