Byzantine Catholic Church Explained

1. What "Byzantine Catholic" Means

Byzantine Catholics are Catholics who worship in the Byzantine rite, the liturgical tradition of Constantinople that the Eastern Orthodox also use, while remaining in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. A visitor who walks into a Byzantine Catholic church on a Sunday morning sees an iconostasis, hears the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom sung without instruments, watches the priest cense the whole church, and may well see a wedding ring on that priest's hand. Everything in the building is Eastern. The commemoration of the Pope in the litanies is what marks the parish as Catholic.

In American usage, "Byzantine Catholic" almost always means one specific church: the Ruthenian church, whose formal title in the United States is the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh. Its people descend from the Carpatho-Rusyns of the Carpathian mountains, and their parishes cluster in western Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio and the old industrial towns of the northeast. Elsewhere the same rite is celebrated by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, the Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Albanian, Belarusian, Russian, Greek and Italo-Albanian Catholic churches, each of them self-governing in its own right.

Sui Iuris in One Paragraph

The Catholic Church is made up of twenty-four churches sui iuris, a Latin phrase meaning "of its own right". Twenty-three of them are Eastern and one is the Latin Church. Each has its own liturgy, its own hierarchy, its own theological idiom and its own canon law, and all of them hold the same faith and the same communion. Our guide to the twenty-three Eastern Catholic churches names each one with its tradition and its government, and our guide to the Latin Church covers the western one. This page stays with the Ruthenian church and the history that made it what it is.

2. Who the Carpatho-Rusyns Are

The Carpatho-Rusyns are an East Slavic people of the southern slopes of the Carpathian mountains, and they have never had a state of their own. Their homeland straddles four modern borders: the Prešov region of eastern Slovakia, the Lemko districts of southeastern Poland, the Transcarpathian oblast of western Ukraine, and a strip of northeastern Hungary, with a settled colony in the Vojvodina region of Serbia. They speak Rusyn dialects, they were mostly hill farmers and shepherds until the industrial age, and their religion has been Byzantine Christianity for as long as the record reaches, with Rusyn tradition tracing it to the ninth-century Slavic mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

Names cause endless confusion here, so it is worth setting them out plainly. "Rusyn" and "Ruthenian" both derive from Rus, and in Latin church documents Ruthenus was long used for any Byzantine Christian of the old Kingdom of Hungary or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which at various times covered Ukrainians, Belarusians and Rusyns together. "Greek Catholic" was the Habsburg administrative term for these Catholics of the Greek rite, coined under Empress Maria Theresa in the eighteenth century, and it stuck. "Byzantine Catholic" is the name chosen in the United States in the twentieth century, partly to avoid the ethnic quarrel and partly because it describes the rite rather than a nation.

Why the Name Fights Matter

The naming question is not decorative. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Rusyn identity was contested by Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian and Slovak national movements, each of which claimed the Rusyns as a branch of itself. Soviet policy after 1945 classified Rusyns as Ukrainians and suppressed the separate designation. Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia and Romania now recognise Rusyns as a distinct national minority, and Ukraine does not. American Rusyn communities preserved a self-understanding that was largely erased at home, which is one reason Pittsburgh matters so much to this story.

A Church Before a Nation

For most of Rusyn history the parish was the institution that carried the people's identity. There was no Rusyn kingdom, no Rusyn university and no Rusyn army. There was a church with its own calendar, its own chant, its own married priests who farmed alongside their parishioners, and a Slavonic liturgical language that no landlord spoke. When Rusyn emigrants reached Pennsylvania, the first thing they built after a house was a church, and the first serious conflict they had in America was about that church. Understanding that will make the rest of this page make sense.

3. The Union of Uzhhorod, 1646

The Union of Uzhhorod is the founding act of the Ruthenian Catholic Church. On 24 April 1646, in the castle chapel at Uzhhorod in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary and is now western Ukraine, sixty-three Byzantine priests of the region declared their communion with the Bishop of Rome in the presence of Bishop George Jakusich of Eger. They asked for and were promised three things: the retention of the Byzantine rite, the right to elect their own bishop subject to papal confirmation, and the same civil and ecclesiastical privileges the Latin clergy of the kingdom enjoyed.

The Uzhhorod agreement followed the pattern of the Union of Brest, agreed in 1595 and proclaimed in 1596, which had brought most of the Orthodox hierarchy of the Kyivan metropolia into communion with Rome on similar terms. Brest is the origin of the Ukrainian and Belarusian Greek Catholic churches. Uzhhorod is the origin of the Ruthenian church and, through a later separation, of the Slovak and Hungarian Greek Catholic churches as well. Further unions followed in the Carpathian region over the next century, and the process was gradual rather than complete on a single day.

Why the Priests Agreed

Mixed motives are the honest account. Religious conviction played a genuine part, and so did the position of Byzantine clergy in a Catholic kingdom where they were treated as serfs of the local nobility while Latin priests were free men. The promise of equal standing was a material promise. Habsburg and Jesuit pressure was real, and so was the counter-pressure of Calvinist princes in Transylvania who wanted the Rusyns kept away from Rome. The historian's version of Uzhhorod is a negotiation among a hierarchy, a monarchy and a mountain clergy, and the theological question of communion with Peter was one strand in it.

The Orthodox reading of these unions is important to state accurately, because it is not a caricature. Orthodox Christians see Brest and Uzhhorod as the detachment of Orthodox bishops and their flocks from their mother churches by a mixture of political leverage and dynastic advantage, leaving Orthodox laity behind without hierarchs. They call the method uniatism, and the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church addressed it at Balamand in 1993, agreeing that uniatism is not an acceptable method for pursuing unity, while affirming that the Eastern Catholic churches that already exist have a right to exist and to serve their faithful. Both halves of that statement stand, and our guide to the twenty-three Eastern Catholic churches works through the uniatism argument in full.

Mukachevo Becomes an Eparchy

The Eparchy of Mukachevo was canonically erected in 1771 by Pope Clement XIV, giving the Rusyn church a bishop of its own rather than a vicariate dependent on the Latin bishop of Eger. Andrew Bacsinsky, who governed the eparchy from 1773 to 1809, moved the see to Uzhhorod, founded a seminary and built a library, and the eparchy became the intellectual centre of Rusyn life. Mukachevo remains today an eparchy in Transcarpathian Ukraine, immediately subject to the Holy See, and it is the ancestral home of every Byzantine Catholic parish in Pittsburgh, Passaic, Parma and Phoenix.

4. From Mukachevo to Pittsburgh

Rusyn emigration to the United States began in earnest in the 1880s and ran until the immigration restrictions of the 1920s closed it. The pull was industrial labour: anthracite coal in northeastern Pennsylvania, bituminous coal and steel around Pittsburgh, mills in Ohio, Connecticut and New Jersey. The push was land hunger and poverty in a mountain region where holdings had been subdivided past the point of subsistence. Whole villages emptied into particular American towns, which is why Rusyn parishes so often cluster in the same valleys and along the same rail lines.

They brought their priests with them, and the priests brought their wives. The first Greek Catholic parish in the United States was organised at Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, in 1884 under Father John Volansky, a married Galician priest sent by the Metropolitan of Lviv. Within a few decades there were hundreds of Byzantine parishes across the industrial belt, built with subscriptions taken from men working ten-hour shifts, and organised by lay brotherhoods that owned the church property and hired the cantor.

The Collision With the Latin Hierarchy

American Catholicism in the 1890s was a Latin church run by Irish and German bishops in a Protestant country, and it was defensive. Anti-Catholic argument in the United States held that priests were sinister celibates loyal to a foreign prince. A married priest in a beard and a chasuble that looked like a cope, celebrating in Slavonic, communing infants with a spoon, keeping Christmas on a different day, was to those bishops a scandal waiting to be used against them. Several of them said as much in writing.

The structural problem underneath was jurisdiction. The Rusyn priests arrived in dioceses governed by Latin ordinaries, with no bishop of their own on American soil and no clear canonical status. A priest needed faculties from the local Latin bishop to function, and a bishop who disapproved of married clergy could refuse them. Rome was petitioned repeatedly from both sides, by American bishops asking for the married priests to be removed and by Rusyn clergy and laity asking for a bishop of their own rite. The petitions collided for forty years.

5. Alexis Toth and the First Departures

Alexis Toth was a Carpatho-Rusyn Greek Catholic priest, a widower and a former seminary professor, who arrived in Minneapolis in 1889 to serve St Mary's Greek Catholic parish. He presented himself to Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, as canon law required, and Ireland refused him faculties. The two men left different accounts of the interview and both agree on the substance: Ireland objected to the existence of a separate Greek Catholic parish and priest in his diocese, and Toth answered that he held a legitimate appointment in a rite Rome recognised.

Toth spent the next two years in an impasse, and in 1891 he and the greater part of his Minneapolis congregation were received into the Russian Orthodox Church by Bishop Vladimir of the Alaskan diocese. He then spent eighteen years travelling among Rusyn and Galician parishes across the northeast and midwest, arguing that their grandparents' faith had been Orthodox before Uzhhorod and that returning to Orthodoxy would end their humiliation at the hands of Latin bishops. Many parishes went with him. Toth died in 1909, and the Orthodox Church in America glorified him as a saint in 1994, naming him the apostle to the immigrants.

How Catholics Should Tell This Story

Nothing is gained by pretending the grievance was invented. A Catholic account of Alexis Toth has to concede that he was refused what he had a right to, that the refusal was the act of a Catholic archbishop, and that the departures which followed were a response to real mistreatment rather than to any change of doctrine. The theological question, whether the remedy for an unjust bishop is to leave communion with the successor of Peter, is a separate question, and Catholics answer it differently than Toth did. Our guide to the papacy and the Petrine office sets out why Catholics hold that communion with Rome is not a matter that mistreatment dissolves.

What followed Toth is the reason this page exists. A movement that began with one refused priest carried parish after parish out of the Catholic communion, and it ran for fifty years. Our guide to Orthodox churches in America traces the receiving side of that movement, including how many of the older parishes of the Orthodox Church in America were Greek Catholic parishes within living memory.

6. Ea Semper and Cum Data Fuerit

Rome answered the American conflict twice, in 1907 and in 1929, and both answers restricted married clergy. Together the two decrees are the central injury in Byzantine Catholic memory in the United States, and any account of this church that skips them is not describing the church that actually exists.

Ea Semper, 1907

Pope Pius X appointed Soter Ortynsky as bishop for the Ruthenian Greek Catholics of the United States in 1907, the first Eastern Catholic bishop in the country, and the decree Ea Semper set the terms of his office. The terms disappointed almost everyone who had petitioned for him. Ortynsky was given no territorial jurisdiction of his own and was made an auxiliary dependent on the Latin ordinary in each diocese where his people lived. The decree also directed that only celibate men be ordained for the United States, transferred the administration of confirmation toward the Latin practice, and applied several other Latin norms to a Byzantine church.

The reaction was severe and it split along ethnic lines that had been forming already. Ortynsky was Galician and many of his clergy were Rusyn, and a bishop who could not protect their discipline was of limited use to either group. More parishes left for Orthodoxy. In 1913 Rome gave Ortynsky proper jurisdiction over all Ruthenian Catholics in the country, and after his death in 1916 the Ruthenian and Ukrainian communities were given separate administrations, formalised as separate exarchates in 1924.

Cum Data Fuerit, 1929

The decree Cum Data Fuerit was issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Oriental Church on 1 March 1929, governing the Ruthenian Greek Catholics of the United States. Most of it is ordinary administrative regulation of eparchial life. Article 12 is the one people remember: it laid down that priests serving in the United States must be celibate, and that married men were not to be ordained for or admitted to ministry in the country. A parallel provision applied to the Ukrainian Greek Catholics.

The decree was not a doctrinal statement. Nothing in it said that married priesthood is wrong, and the Catholic Church has never taught that, since married clergy have served in the East continuously since the apostles and the Council of Trullo in 692 legislated for them explicitly. Cum Data Fuerit was a disciplinary regulation for one territory, made under sustained pressure from Latin bishops who found married Eastern clergy an embarrassment in their dioceses. It bound the Eastern churches in the country that had least power to resist it.

7. What the Restriction Cost

The cost of the married clergy restriction was the loss of a very large share of the American Byzantine Catholic population to Orthodoxy, and the loss was permanent. Parishes voted at meetings, took the deeds their brotherhoods held, kept their buildings and their cantors and their chant, and changed the name of the bishop commemorated in the litany. The liturgy on the following Sunday was the same liturgy. That is what made the move so easy to make and so hard to reverse.

The Bodies That Resulted

Two Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States exist directly because of this conflict. The Russian Orthodox mission diocese, later reorganised and today the Orthodox Church in America, absorbed the parishes that followed Alexis Toth from 1891 onward, and their arrival transformed a small Alaskan and Californian mission into a church with a heartland in Pennsylvania. The American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese was organised in 1938 by parishes that left in the aftermath of Cum Data Fuerit, was received under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, elected Orestes Chornock as its first bishop, and is seated at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Its prostopinije chant is the same chant sung in Byzantine Catholic churches a few miles away.

Precise counts of parishes and individuals lost are disputed among historians and no single authoritative figure exists, in part because parishes moved in stages and records of the period are uneven. This page therefore describes the scale qualitatively. Readers who want the documentary detail should look for the published work of Rusyn-American historians on the period, above all the studies of Carpatho-Rusyn settlement in the United States.

What Was Lost Beyond Numbers

Three losses compound each other. The first is people, and a small church that loses a large share of its members loses the density that keeps parishes, schools and seminaries alive. The second is confidence: a generation of Byzantine Catholics learned that being visibly Eastern was a liability, and many responded by becoming as Latin as possible, which is the subject of section 10. The third is trust, and it has proved the longest lived. Byzantine Catholic memory of Rome in America is genuinely double, holding both the communion the church has preserved at cost and the decrees that cost it so much.

The Injury Cuts Toward Rome, Not Toward the East

A Catholic reader should notice which way the grievance runs. Byzantine Catholics did not leave because Rome taught something they rejected. They left because Latin churchmen in America would not let them keep a discipline Rome itself had guaranteed to their ancestors in 1646, and Rome sided with those churchmen in 1907 and again in 1929. The Orthodox objection to uniatism gains a good deal of its force from exactly this record. When Orthodox critics say that communion with Rome ends with the absorption of Eastern tradition, the American Ruthenian experience is the case they cite, and answering it honestly means conceding the facts before disputing the conclusion.

8. Where the Married Clergy Question Stands

The restriction is gone. On 14 June 2014 Pope Francis approved a pontifical decree of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches permitting Eastern Catholic bishops to ordain married men outside the traditional Eastern territories, ending the regime that Ea Semper and Cum Data Fuerit had established for North America, Australia and western Europe. The decree asks an Eastern bishop to inform and consult the Latin episcopal conference of the country before ordaining married men there, and it leaves the decision with the Eastern bishop. Married Byzantine Catholic priests are now ordained and serving in the United States.

How the Eastern Discipline Actually Works

The Eastern rule is straightforward and is often misreported, so it is worth stating precisely.

• A man may marry, and then be ordained. Ordination does not come first.
• A man already ordained does not marry afterwards.
• A priest whose wife dies does not remarry.
• Bishops are chosen from celibate clergy, in practice usually monks or widowed priests.
• Celibate priesthood is honoured in the East and monasticism is central to Eastern life. The Eastern churches have never held that a married priesthood is preferable, only that it is permitted.

The Council of Trullo, held at Constantinople in 692, legislated this discipline for the East in explicit terms, and it is older than the council that codified it. The Latin Church took a different road toward obligatory celibacy for its own clergy, settled in the West by the reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Latin discipline is a discipline rather than a doctrine, which is why the Latin Church can and does ordain married former Anglican and Lutheran clergy today. Our guide to the Catholic priesthood covers the Latin rule and the reasons given for it.

What This Does and Does Not Change

The 2014 decree restores a right. It does not undo a century of demographic loss, and the parishes that left in 1891 or 1938 are not coming back because a rule changed in 2014. Byzantine Catholic leaders have generally received the decree as a matter of justice long delayed, and the practical work in front of the church is different from the legal question: keeping parishes open in shrinking industrial towns, forming enough clergy of any state of life, and passing on a chant tradition that lives mostly in the memory of cantors.

The Eastern column describes the norms of the Byzantine churches as set out in the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated by John Paul II in the apostolic constitution Sacri Canones on 18 October 1990 and in force from 1 October 1991, together with the particular law of the Ruthenian church. The Latin column follows the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Local practice varies, and the parish is the place to ask.

9. Inside a Byzantine Catholic Divine Liturgy

The Sunday service in a Byzantine Catholic church is the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, sung from beginning to end, lasting between seventy and ninety minutes in most parishes. The Liturgy of St Basil the Great replaces it on ten days of the year, including the Sundays of Great Lent, and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is served on Lenten weekdays. There is no low form and no spoken version. Everything the priest, deacon, cantor and people say is sung, most often without instruments, in a plainchant idiom that a first-time Latin visitor finds strange for about fifteen minutes and then finds difficult to leave.

What You See

An iconostasis, a screen of icons with three doors, stands between the nave and the sanctuary. Its arrangement is fixed by tradition: Christ to the right of the royal doors, the Theotokos to the left, then the patron of the church and a chosen saint. Candles burn in front of icons that people kiss on entering. Incense is used generously and repeatedly. There are usually few or no pews in a traditional building, though most American parishes installed them long ago. The priest wears a phelonion rather than a chasuble, and the deacon an orarion over one shoulder.

What You Hear

The liturgy is built from litanies, antiphons, hymns and the great eucharistic prayer called the anaphora. Three pieces recur enough that a visitor will learn them in one visit: the Trisagion, "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us"; the hymn to the Theotokos; and the responses "Lord, have mercy" and "To you, O Lord". The Nicene Creed is sung by everyone. The Ruthenian church sings it in the form the councils left it, without the Filioque, which is the standard practice of the Byzantine Catholic churches and which our guide to the Filioque clause explains at length.

The music of the Ruthenian church is prostopinije, "plain chant", an eight-tone Carpathian system sung by the whole congregation and carried by a cantor rather than a choir. It descends from Byzantine chant filtered through centuries of Slavic village singing, and it travelled to America with the emigrants intact. Cantors learned it by ear from their fathers, and the surviving repertoire was written down largely in the twentieth century.

How Communion Is Given

Communion in the Byzantine rite is given from a spoon. The consecrated leavened bread is placed in the chalice with the Precious Blood, and the priest gives both together from the spoon into the mouth of each communicant, saying the person's baptismal name. The communicant tilts the head back, does not open a hand, does not touch the spoon, and does not answer "Amen". Infants who were chrismated at their baptism are communed from that day, carried to the chalice in a parent's arms. Any Catholic in a state of grace may receive, and our guide to the Eucharist covers the doctrine both traditions hold in common.

The Fasts and the Calendar

Byzantine Catholic fasting is more extensive than the modern Latin discipline, with four fasting seasons: Great Lent, the Apostles' Fast, the Dormition Fast in the first half of August, and the Nativity Fast (Philip's Fast) before Christmas. Great Lent begins on a Monday, Clean Monday, rather than on a Wednesday, and Saturdays and Sundays are not counted as fast days. Most Byzantine Catholic parishes in the United States now keep the Gregorian calendar for fixed feasts and celebrate Pascha on the Western date, and some retain the Julian reckoning, so the parish is the place to check rather than the internet.

10. Latinization and the Recovery of the Rite

Latinization is the name Eastern Catholics give to the adoption of Latin practices in place of their own, and it affected every Eastern Catholic church in some degree. The American Byzantine parishes were latinized heavily. Some of it was imposed by decree and some was absorbed by imitation, from clergy trained in Latin seminaries and from laity who wanted to look like the Catholic majority around them. By the middle of the twentieth century a Byzantine Catholic church in Pennsylvania might have pews, an organ, statues, stations of the cross, a communion rail, benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, rosaries in the pews, first Communion at seven, confirmation at twelve, and a low form of the liturgy read quietly on weekdays.

Every item in that list is a Latin devotional or disciplinary form transplanted into a Byzantine church. None of them is wrong in itself, and Catholics of any rite may pray the rosary. Together they replaced a coherent tradition with a hybrid, and the effect was to make the Byzantine churches look like an eccentric Latin parish rather than the Eastern church they are, which weakened the very argument for their existence.

What the Church Directed Instead

Rome reversed course in the twentieth century, and did so clearly. Orientalium Ecclesiarum in 1964 directed Eastern Catholics to keep their own rites and to restore what had been lost. The 1996 Instruction for Applying the Liturgical Prescriptions of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, from the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, went further into detail, calling for the recovery of authentic Eastern liturgical practice and criticising hybrid forms. Pope John Paul II's 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen asked the whole Church to know and love the Eastern tradition, and told the Eastern Catholic churches that their vocation is to be fully themselves.

What Recovery Has Looked Like

The Ruthenian church has restored a good deal. Chrismation and infant Communion at baptism have been recovered as the normal practice, so Byzantine Catholic children commune from infancy again. Iconography has replaced statuary in many restored churches. The full sung liturgy has displaced the quiet Latin-style form. Cantor programmes have worked to keep prostopinije singing in the assembly rather than a choir loft. Vespers and Matins are served in more parishes than a generation ago.

Recovery has costs of its own, and honest accounts say so. Families formed in the latinized parish of the 1950s did not always welcome the removal of devotions they loved. A church losing members cannot easily afford to unsettle the ones it has. The pastoral judgment about how fast to move has divided clergy from clergy and parish from parish, and the argument continues.

11. The 2007 Revised Divine Liturgy

The Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh promulgated a revised English text of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in 2007, mandated for use in its four eparchies from 30 June of that year. The revision produced a sustained public dispute inside a small church, and a reader researching Byzantine Catholicism online will run into it, so it is worth describing accurately and without taking a side the Church has not taken.

What the Revision Did

The 2007 text gave a new English translation with a musical setting adapted to it, shortened or omitted some litanies and antiphon verses in the ordinary parish form, and adopted horizontally inclusive language in places where the Greek uses masculine generics for the human race. The best known instance is the Nicene Creed, where "for us men and for our salvation" became "for us and for our salvation". The revision was prepared over many years by an inter-eparchial commission and was confirmed by Rome before promulgation.

What the Objections Were

Critics, including clergy, cantors and lay musicians, argued three things. The translation departed from the received English text that Byzantine Catholics and Orthodox in America had come to share, which set the church apart from its Orthodox neighbours at a time when it had been trying to close that distance. The shortening of litanies moved in the direction of Latin brevity, against the recovery of the full Byzantine office that the 1996 Instruction had urged. And the inclusive-language changes were held to be a Western cultural argument imported into a Byzantine text. Supporters answered that the older English translation had defects of its own, that the omissions restored a genuine parish practice rather than inventing one, and that the language changes concerned the human race and left every word about God untouched.

12. Mukachevo Under Persecution

The Byzantine Catholic story in the old country is a martyrs' story. When the Soviet Union annexed Transcarpathia after the Second World War, the Eparchy of Mukachevo was targeted for liquidation and forced absorption into the Russian Orthodox Church, on the model already applied to the Ukrainian Greek Catholics at the Lviv sobor of 1946. Bishop Theodore Romzha of Mukachevo refused to comply. He was attacked in a staged road collision in October 1947, survived, and died in hospital days later. Pope John Paul II beatified him as a martyr in 2001. The eparchy was suppressed in 1949, its property transferred, and its clergy imprisoned, deported or driven underground.

The same policy was applied across the border in Czechoslovakia. At the Prešov assembly of April 1950 the Greek Catholic Church there was declared dissolved and its faithful assigned to the Orthodox Church. Bishop Paul Peter Gojdic of Prešov refused and died in prison in 1960, and his auxiliary Vasyl Hopko died in 1976 after years of imprisonment and confinement. John Paul II beatified Gojdic in 2001 and Hopko in 2003. The Czechoslovak Greek Catholic Church was legalised again in 1968 during the Prague Spring, and the church in Soviet Transcarpathia stayed underground until 1989.

Why This Matters to the Ecumenical Question

The forced absorptions of 1946 to 1950 are a wound on the other side of the ledger, and they bear directly on Catholic and Orthodox relations. Eastern Catholics remember that the Moscow Patriarchate received parishes, buildings and clergy handed over by a state police apparatus. Orthodox writers reply that many local Orthodox had no part in the state's actions and that the churches concerned had themselves been taken from Orthodoxy in earlier centuries under a different kind of pressure. The property disputes that followed 1989 across Ukraine, Slovakia and Romania were bitter, and they are one practical reason the theological dialogue has been so hard to sustain. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism covers the framework the Church works within, and our guide to the Great Schism of 1054 covers the long division these churches sit inside.

The Eparchy Today

The Eparchy of Mukachevo functions openly again, immediately subject to the Holy See rather than to any metropolitan, and it remains the ancestral centre of Ruthenian Catholic life. It serves the Rusyn population of Transcarpathia in a country at war, alongside the much larger Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church with which it is in communion and from which it is administratively distinct. The Ruthenian church also has an apostolic exarchate in the Czech Republic, and the Rusyn communities of the Vojvodina in Serbia are served by their own Byzantine Catholic eparchy at Ruski Krstur.

13. Byzantine Catholic or Orthodox: How to Tell

Two churches on the same street in a Pennsylvania town can look identical from the pew and belong to different communions. The confusion is genuine, it affects real decisions about marriage, baptism and Sunday obligation, and there are reliable ways to resolve it.

The Tests That Work

• The litany. A Catholic parish commemorates the Pope of Rome by name in the litanies. An Orthodox parish commemorates its own patriarch, metropolitan or archbishop and does not name the Pope.
• The sign outside. "Byzantine Catholic", "Ukrainian Catholic", "Melkite Catholic" and "Ruthenian Catholic" all mean Catholic. "Greek Catholic" on its own is the harder case, because the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese carries "Greek Catholic" in its own legal title, so a parish sign can read Greek Catholic and belong to an Orthodox jurisdiction. Read the whole sign and look for the word Orthodox anywhere in it.
• The diocese named on the bulletin. Eparchy of Passaic, Parma, Phoenix or the Archeparchy of Pittsburgh are Catholic. Diocese of Johnstown, or a listing under the Orthodox Church in America or the Ecumenical Patriarchate, is Orthodox.
• Ask the priest. This is the fastest method and nobody minds the question.

What Follows From the Answer

The practical consequences are clear. A Latin Catholic fulfils the Sunday obligation at a Byzantine Catholic Divine Liturgy, because canon 1248 of the Code of Canon Law satisfies it by assisting at a liturgy in any Catholic rite. Attending an Orthodox Divine Liturgy is a good thing to do and it does not discharge that obligation. A Catholic may receive Communion at a Byzantine Catholic parish freely, and should not present themselves for Communion at an Orthodox parish, since Orthodox discipline reserves the Eucharist to Orthodox Christians and the courtesy of respecting that is part of taking their position seriously. Our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church sets out Orthodox belief in Orthodox terms and works through the questions still open between the two communions.

Changing Rites Is Not Casual

A Catholic belongs to a church sui iuris, ordinarily the one of their father at baptism, and this is a canonical status rather than a preference. A Latin Catholic may attend a Byzantine parish as often as they like, register there, support it and receive the sacraments there, without any change of status. Formal transfer of enrolment from one church sui iuris to another requires the consent of both bishops and, in most cases, the Holy See, under the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. Anyone drawn to the Byzantine tradition should attend for a good while and speak to the pastor before raising the question of transfer.

14. Where the Church Stands Today

The Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States is a small church carrying a large history. The Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh has four eparchies, the Archeparchy of Pittsburgh with the eparchies of Passaic in New Jersey, Parma in Ohio and Phoenix in Arizona, the last having moved from Van Nuys in California in 2010. Parishes have closed and merged as the steel and coal towns emptied, and new communities have formed in the south and west where the descendants moved. Numbers are far below the peak of the immigrant generation, and the trend has been downward for decades.

What the Church Still Has

Three things, and they are worth naming. A complete liturgical tradition, kept and now largely restored, with the daily office and a full year of fasts and feasts. A body of chant, the prostopinije, which is a genuine folk-liturgical art form belonging to the Carpathian churches alone. And a witness that the Catholic Church is wider than the Latin rite, which is a claim the Church makes constantly and can only demonstrate through churches like this one. A Latin Catholic who has never attended a Divine Liturgy has taken the Church's own teaching about its Eastern lung on trust.

Rusyn heritage in America has kept a public face beyond the parishes. Andy Warhol was raised in a Rusyn Byzantine Catholic family in Pittsburgh and attended St John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church there, and the iconostasis of his childhood is a standing subject in writing about his repeated images. Rusyn cultural societies, chant workshops and the seminary at Pittsburgh continue the transmission that the parish once handled alone.

What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Find a Byzantine Catholic parish and go. Stand through a Divine Liturgy, sing what you can, and stay for the coffee afterwards where the history in this article will be told to you by people whose grandparents lived it. Learn the correct names and use them, since Ruthenian, Rusyn, Greek Catholic and Byzantine Catholic each mean something specific. Speak accurately about what happened in 1907 and 1929 rather than defending it, because the record is what it is and the Church herself corrected the policy. Hold onto the point that the Catholic Church is a communion of twenty-four churches and that uniformity was never the condition of unity.

Related Topics