POLISH FRIARS. - Antitrinitarian heretics, Socinians, who existed in Poland in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Fausto Socini, when he moved to Poland in 1579, in fact assumed the leadership of the various Antitrinitarian congregations that were widely spread there, after they had separated in 1562 from the other Protestant "churches," and constituted them into the Ecclesia fratrum Polonorum, with its center at Rakow. There were schools there, a printing house specializing in the printing and dissemination of "Unitarian" writings, and there a synod assembled annually. The Synod of 1612, attended by about four hundred delegates, was the most numerous: they represented 115 "churches."
The decline of the F. P. began in 1627, when they were driven out of Lublin by a popular uprising; ten years later, after some fanatical students of Rakow had dared to deface a Cross exposed for public veneration, the Diet of Warsaw ordered the closing of the schools and of the printing house of the sect and exiled its leaders. Finally, in 1658, since it had turned out that the F. P. maintained secret relations with the prince of Transylvania, Rakoczi, who had invaded Poland, King John Casimir banished them all from the kingdom. Some emigrated to Transylvania; others to Holland, where they began the publication of a Bibliotheca fratrum Polonorum, which was inaugurated with a biography of Fausto Socino. At Amsterdam the so-called Catechism of Rakow was likewise published, the work of Samuel Przipkowicz (Przipkowicz), containing the whole body of Antitrinitarian doctrines. Some other group took refuge in Germany and in England. The movement survived only a few years after the forced diaspora, because the F. P. disappeared completely between the end of the 17th century and the beginnings of the next.
For their doctrine, v. SOCINI.