The 23 Eastern Catholic Churches

1. What "Sui Iuris" Means

Sui iuris is Latin for "of its own right," and in Catholic canon law it names a church that governs itself under its own hierarchy while remaining in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches defines a church sui iuris as a community of the faithful joined together by a hierarchy and recognised as self-governing by the supreme authority of the Church (CCEO canon 27). Twenty-three Eastern churches carry that status, and the Latin Church carries it too, which is why Catholics speak of twenty-four churches in one communion.

The word most people reach for instead is "rite," and it is worth separating the two. A rite, in the Eastern code, is the whole liturgical, theological, spiritual and disciplinary patrimony a church has inherited from its people and its history (CCEO canon 28). Several distinct churches can share one rite: fourteen Eastern Catholic churches celebrate the Byzantine rite, and they remain fourteen churches because each has its own bishops, its own synod, its own language and its own particular law. Rite describes what a church prays. Sui iuris describes who governs it.

What Self-Government Actually Includes

Self-government is concrete rather than honorary. A patriarchal or major archiepiscopal church elects its own bishops in synod, legislates its own particular law, sets its own liturgical books and translations, orders its own fasting seasons, runs its own seminaries and monasteries, and administers its own tribunals. Rome confirms rather than appoints in much of this, and the reach of Roman intervention is itself set by canon law rather than by custom.

Every Catholic is enrolled in one of the twenty-four churches, usually at baptism through his father's enrolment, and that enrolment follows him for life. A Ukrainian Greek Catholic in Chicago is bound by the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches and by the particular law of his own church, and not by the Latin code. Transferring from one church to another requires the consent of the Holy See (CCEO canon 32), which is a measure of how seriously the distinction is held.

2. The Five Liturgical Traditions

The twenty-three Eastern Catholic churches worship in five great liturgical families, each descended from an ancient patriarchal see and its missionary reach. Learning the five is the fastest way to hold the whole list in your head, because each family has a recognisable shape of worship, a liturgical language, and a geography.

Byzantine (Constantinopolitan)

The Byzantine tradition grew from the liturgy of Constantinople, shaped by the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and, on ten days of the year, the longer Liturgy of St Basil the Great. Its worship is sung throughout, screened by an iconostasis, and structured by a rich cycle of Vespers, Matins and the Hours. Fourteen of the twenty-three Eastern Catholic churches belong to it, and their liturgical languages include Greek, Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, Romanian, Arabic, Hungarian and English.

Alexandrian

The Alexandrian tradition descends from the church of Egypt and preserves the Anaphora of St Basil in its Coptic form together with elements from the Liturgy of St Mark. Three Eastern Catholic churches belong to it: the Coptic Catholic Church in Egypt, and the Ethiopian and Eritrean Catholic churches, whose Ge'ez rite carries an unusually large set of eucharistic prayers, more than a dozen anaphoras in the received books, and a strong Old Testament colouring in its chant, its fasting and its ceremonial.

Antiochian (West Syriac)

The West Syriac tradition comes from Antioch and centres on the Anaphora of St James, prayed in Syriac, a literary form of Aramaic belonging to the same language family Jesus spoke, though his own dialect was the Aramaic of Galilee. Three Eastern Catholic churches belong to it: the Maronite Church of Lebanon, the Syriac Catholic Church, and the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church of Kerala in southern India. The Maronite liturgy sits inside this family while keeping a large body of anaphoras of its own, among them the ancient Anaphora of Sharar, and Maronites describe their rite as Antiochene Syriac Maronite rather than as a variant of anyone else's.

Chaldean (East Syriac)

The East Syriac tradition descends from the church of Mesopotamia and Persia and centres on the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, one of the oldest eucharistic prayers in continuous use anywhere in Christianity. The Chaldean Catholic Church of Iraq and the Syro-Malabar Church of Kerala belong to it. The Syro-Malabar Church traces its origin to the apostle Thomas and the Christian communities of the Malabar coast.

Armenian

The Armenian tradition stands on its own, a single family with a single Eastern Catholic church, the Armenian Catholic Church. Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion in the early fourth century, and its liturgy uses classical Armenian, unleavened bread and undiluted wine, features that make it distinct from every other Eastern rite.

3. All 23 Churches, Named and Placed

Here are the twenty-three Eastern Catholic churches sui iuris in alphabetical order, each with its liturgical tradition, its form of government, and the region where its faithful are concentrated. Fourteen are Byzantine, three Alexandrian, three West Syriac, two East Syriac, and one Armenian.

Sources: the list of churches sui iuris and their governing structures follows the Annuario Pontificio, the statistical yearbook of the Holy See, and the reporting of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, the pontifical agency for the Eastern churches. The Eritrean Catholic Church was erected as a metropolitan church sui iuris by Pope Francis in 2015, and the Macedonian Greek Catholic Church was recognised as sui iuris in 2018, which is why older lists of the Eastern churches give a count of twenty-one or twenty-two.

Which Are the Largest

The Eastern Catholic churches together are a small share of the Catholic communion. Figures compiled in the Annuario Pontificio and summarised by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association put Eastern Catholics in the region of eighteen million people, against more than a billion Latin Catholics. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Syro-Malabar Church are the two largest by a wide margin, each numbering in the millions, followed by the Maronite, Melkite, Chaldean, Romanian and Syro-Malankara churches. Several of the churches on the list are very small: the Belarusian and Russian Greek Catholic communities number in the thousands, and the Albanian and Bulgarian churches are comparably modest.

Source for the size figures above: the Annuario Pontificio of the Holy See, as compiled and summarised in the annual reporting of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. The totals are given as approximations because several of these churches count faithful across diasporas that no single registry covers.

Membership figures for the Eastern Catholic churches are drawn from the Annuario Pontificio as reported by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. Counts for churches under persecution or scattered by war are estimates that the agencies themselves describe as provisional.

4. How Each Church Is Governed

The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches sorts the twenty-three churches into four grades of self-government, and the grade determines how much a church decides for itself and how much Rome decides for it. The code was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1990 and came into force in 1991, replacing a patchwork of partial legislation issued between the 1940s and the 1950s.

Patriarchal Churches

Six churches are headed by a patriarch: the Coptic, Maronite, Syriac, Melkite, Chaldean and Armenian Catholic churches. A patriarch is elected by the synod of bishops of his own church and then requests ecclesiastical communion from the Pope, who grants it. Inside the traditional territory of the church, the synod elects bishops from candidates the Holy See has already judged suitable, erects eparchies after consulting Rome, and legislates for its own faithful, a competence far wider than any Latin bishops' conference holds. The patriarch is addressed as father and head of his church, and Eastern canon law gives patriarchs precedence of honour over bishops of every degree, with the order of precedence itself set by the Roman Pontiff (CCEO canon 58).

Major Archiepiscopal Churches

Four churches are headed by a major archbishop: the Ukrainian, Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankara and Romanian Greek Catholic churches. The powers of a major archbishop and his synod are substantially those of a patriarch, with one difference in the election of the head: a major archbishop must be confirmed in office by the Pope before he can be enthroned. Ukrainian Greek Catholics have asked for the rank of patriarchate for decades, and the request has not been granted.

Metropolitan and Other Churches Sui Iuris

Five churches are metropolitan sui iuris, headed by a metropolitan appointed by the Pope from a list of candidates proposed by the church's own council of hierarchs: the Ethiopian, Eritrean, Ruthenian, Slovak and Hungarian churches. The remaining eight are governed as eparchies, apostolic exarchates or apostolic administrations directly dependent on the Holy See, an arrangement that reflects small numbers or a history of suppression rather than any lesser dignity.

The Roman office that deals with all of them is the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, founded by Pope Benedict XV in 1917 as the Congregation for the Oriental Church and reorganised under the constitution Praedicate Evangelium in 2022. The same pope founded the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome in 1917 so that Eastern theology and canon law would be studied on their own terms rather than through Latin categories.

5. How the Eastern Catholic Churches Came to Be

The Eastern Catholic churches arrived in communion with Rome by three different routes, and confusing the three is the source of most bad arguments about them. Two churches say they never left. Several entered communion through a corporate union of a whole province with its bishops. Others formed when part of an Eastern church accepted communion with Rome and the rest did not, leaving two hierarchies where there had been one.

The Churches That Say They Never Separated

The Maronite Church holds that it has been in communion with Rome without interruption. Its own account traces the church to the fourth-century hermit Maron and the monastic community around him in the Orontes valley, and formal contacts with Rome were re-established in the twelfth century during the Crusader period. The Italo-Albanian Catholic Church is the other case: Byzantine-rite communities in Calabria and Sicily, some of them of ancient Greek origin and some descended from Albanians who fled the Ottoman advance in the fifteenth century, who have always been in communion with Rome while keeping the Byzantine liturgy.

Corporate Unions

The Union of Brest, agreed in 1595 and proclaimed in 1596, brought most of the Orthodox hierarchy of the Kyivan metropolia, then within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, into communion with Rome on terms that guaranteed the Byzantine rite, the Slavonic liturgy and the married priesthood. The Union of Uzhhorod in 1646 did the same for clergy in the Carpathian region under Habsburg rule. The Ukrainian, Belarusian, Slovak, Hungarian and Ruthenian churches descend from these events. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church arose from a comparable union in Transylvania around 1700 under Habsburg administration.

Divisions Within an Eastern Church

The Melkite Greek Catholic Church took its present form in 1724, when a disputed patriarchal election in Antioch produced two claimants, one recognised by Rome and one by Constantinople, and the community divided along that line. The Chaldean Catholic Church emerged from long and repeated contacts between Rome and factions of the Church of the East from the sixteenth century onward. The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian Catholic churches formed when portions of the corresponding Oriental Orthodox churches entered communion with Rome through missionary contacts from the seventeenth century onward, with their own hierarchies erected between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. India has the most tangled history of all. The Saint Thomas Christians of the Malabar coast were an East Syriac church that Portuguese authorities brought under Latin jurisdiction in the sixteenth century, a process the Synod of Diamper formalised in 1599. Resentment at that jurisdiction produced the Coonan Cross Oath of 1653, after which one part of the community stayed in communion with Rome and became the Syro-Malabar Church, while the other part eventually took up the West Syriac rite and became the Malankara Church. The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church came out of that second line in 1930, when Mar Ivanios led a group of Malankara Orthodox into communion with Rome while keeping the West Syriac rite they had by then made their own.

The route matters because the Orthodox objection set out in section 10 applies with real force to the second and third categories and hardly at all to the first. A Maronite is not answerable for the Union of Brest, and a Ukrainian Greek Catholic born in 1990 did not negotiate it either. For the wider map of how the Christian churches divided, see our guide to the Christian denominations.

6. Married Clergy as an Eastern Discipline

Most Eastern Catholic churches ordain married men to the priesthood, and this is the ancient and normal discipline of the Christian East rather than an exception granted by Rome. The rule across the East, Catholic and Orthodox alike, is simple in outline: a man may marry before ordination and not after it, a widowed priest does not remarry, and bishops are chosen from among celibate clergy, in practice usually monks. The Latin discipline of a celibate presbyterate is the local custom of one church among twenty-four, held with great seriousness in that church and never imposed as the standard by which the others are measured.

What the Council Said

The Second Vatican Council addressed the question directly. Presbyterorum Ordinis 16 states that the council does not intend to change the discipline lawfully in force in the Eastern churches, and it asks the married priests of those churches to persevere in their vocation and continue to spend their lives fully and generously for the flock entrusted to them. The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes the same point in describing celibacy as a discipline observed in the Latin Church, while noting that the Eastern churches ordain married men and choose their bishops from the unmarried (CCC 1580).

The North American Suppression and Its Cost

Married Eastern clergy were nonetheless restricted for most of the twentieth century in the countries where Eastern Catholics emigrated. Under pressure from Latin bishops in the United States who regarded married priests as a scandal to their own faithful, Rome issued the decree Ea Semper in 1907 and then Cum Data Fuerit in 1929, effectively barring married Eastern priests from ministry in North America. The consequence is a matter of record: substantial numbers of Ruthenian and Ukrainian parishes left communion with Rome for the Orthodox Church, a movement associated above all with the priest Alexis Toth, who was refused faculties by the Latin archbishop of Saint Paul in 1889 and who is now canonised as a saint by the Orthodox Church in America.

That restriction has been undone. In June 2014 the Congregation for the Oriental Churches issued a pontifical decree providing norms under which Eastern Catholic bishops may ordain married men outside the traditional territories of their churches, including North America, Australia and Western Europe, with notification to the Holy See. Married Eastern Catholic priests now serve openly in American and Canadian parishes.

7. Inside an Eastern Catholic Divine Liturgy

An Eastern Catholic Sunday service is called the Divine Liturgy, and a Latin Catholic walking into one for the first time will recognise the structure and almost nothing of the surface. The liturgy is sung from beginning to end, often without instruments. A screen of icons, the iconostasis, stands between the nave and the altar, with doors that open and close through the service. The congregation frequently stands rather than kneels, especially in the Paschal season, and crosses itself from right shoulder to left.

What Happens at the Altar

The Byzantine Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom runs about ninety minutes and follows the same two-part shape as the Roman Mass: a liturgy of the word with readings, psalmody and homily, and a liturgy of the Eucharist with the offering, the anaphora, and Communion. The bread is leavened, cut from a stamped loaf called the prosphora. Communion is given to standing communicants from a spoon, the consecrated bread already placed in the chalice, and the communicant gives his baptismal name to the priest. The epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the gifts, is prayed with an emphasis that Eastern theology treats as central to the consecration.

The Eucharist confected in these liturgies is the same Eucharist, and Catholic teaching on the real presence set out in our guide to the Eucharist applies without qualification. A Latin Catholic may receive Communion at an Eastern Catholic Divine Liturgy and satisfies the Sunday obligation by attending one.

Initiation in One Service

The most striking difference for a Western visitor is the initiation of infants. In the Eastern churches a baby is baptised, chrismated and given Holy Communion in a single service, the ancient order of Christian initiation that the West kept for centuries and later separated into three stages spread across childhood. An Eastern Catholic infant receives the Eucharist from a spoon at the same liturgy in which he is baptised. The theology behind both practices is the same, and our guides to baptism and confirmation explain the Western sequence; the Eastern churches simply never divided it.

Fasting, Icons and the Creed

Eastern fasting is stricter and longer than the modern Latin practice, with the Great Fast before Pascha abstaining from meat, dairy and eggs, and with three further fasting seasons in the year. Icons are venerated with a bow and a kiss, and Eastern theology defends them on the ground the Second Council of Nicaea gave in 787, that the Son took real flesh and can therefore be depicted. Most Eastern Catholic churches of the Byzantine tradition recite the Creed without the Filioque, in the form the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople gave it, a practice Rome has explicitly permitted and encouraged. The theology of the procession of the Spirit is treated in our guide to the Holy Spirit.

8. Orientalium Ecclesiarum and Equal Dignity

Orientalium Ecclesiarum is the Second Vatican Council's decree on the Eastern Catholic churches, promulgated on 21 November 1964, and it is the shortest and most quoted document in this whole subject. Its central claim is that the churches of East and West are of equal dignity, that none of them is superior to the others by reason of rite, and that all enjoy the same rights and are under the same obligations, including the obligation to preach the Gospel to the whole world (Orientalium Ecclesiarum 3).

What the Decree Requires

The decree turns that principle into duties. Eastern Catholics are to preserve their own liturgical rites and forms of life, and are told that changes should come only from their own organic development (OE 6). The decree goes further and instructs Eastern Catholics who have drifted from their inheritance through circumstance to take steps to return to their ancestral traditions. The decree asks that the rights and privileges of the patriarchs be restored according to the ancient tradition of each church and the decrees of the ecumenical councils (OE 9). Those whose office or ministry brings them into regular contact with the Eastern churches are to be instructed in their rites, discipline, doctrine and history rather than left ignorant of them (OE 4).

The same council teaches in Lumen Gentium 23 that the variety of local churches with their own traditions demonstrates the catholicity of the undivided Church. Pope John Paul II pressed the point repeatedly, most memorably in the image that the Church must learn to breathe again with her two lungs, East and West, which he used in the encyclical Ut Unum Sint in 1995 and elsewhere. His apostolic letter Orientale Lumen of the same year was written to make Latin Catholics acquainted with a tradition most of them had never encountered.

The Older Roman Commitments

The council's teaching had precedent. Pope Leo XIII issued the apostolic letter Orientalium Dignitas in 1894 forbidding Latin clergy from inducing Eastern Catholics to transfer to the Latin rite, and imposing penalties on those who did. Pope Benedict XIV had defended Eastern usages in the eighteenth century. The commitments were real, and they were also unevenly kept, which is the subject of the next section.

9. Latinization and the Recovery of Tradition

Latinization is the name Eastern Catholics give to the adoption of Latin practices in place of their own, and it is the internal wound of these churches. It happened over centuries and largely without malice: Eastern communities under Latin bishops, seminarians trained in Latin theology, faithful who wanted to look like the Catholics around them, and missionaries who took Roman forms for Catholic ones.

What Was Lost

The effects are catalogued honestly in Eastern Catholic writing. Iconostases were removed or reduced so the altar could be seen. Latin devotions moved in, the rosary and the Stations of the Cross displacing the Akathist and the Paraklesis. Unleavened bread appeared where leavened bread belonged. Statues replaced icons. The Filioque was inserted into the Creed. Confirmation and first Communion were separated from baptism to follow the Latin timetable. Priests shaved their beards, adopted the Roman collar, and in some places celebrated a shortened low liturgy modelled on the Latin low Mass. Eastern theology was taught out of Latin scholastic manuals.

The Recovery

Restoration has been running since the Second Vatican Council and has accelerated. The 1996 Instruction for Applying the Liturgical Prescriptions of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, issued by the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, is the practical charter: it directs Eastern Catholic churches to restore their authentic liturgical tradition, removes accretions taken from the Latin rite, and warns that a church which loses its own patrimony has less to bring to the reconciliation of East and West. Iconostases have been rebuilt, Byzantine chant recovered, the older order of initiation restored in parish after parish, and married clergy returned to North America.

The recovery is contested inside the churches themselves. Some Eastern Catholic families have prayed the rosary for four generations and experience its removal as loss rather than restoration, and pastors have to weigh authenticity against the real devotional life of real people. Latin Catholics attached to their own older forms, described in our guide to the Traditional Latin Mass, will recognise the shape of that argument even though the content differs entirely.

10. The Orthodox Objection to Uniatism

Orthodox Christians raise a serious and specific objection to the existence of the Eastern Catholic churches, and it deserves to be stated fully in Orthodox terms before any Catholic answer. The objection concerns how these churches were made, what they were made for, and what their continued existence implies about how Rome understands unity. Orthodox theologians who press it have no quarrel with Eastern liturgy as such, since the liturgy in question is their own.

The Objection as the Orthodox Make It

Orthodox theologians argue, first, that the unions were secured by political power rather than by theological persuasion. At Brest in 1596 the Orthodox hierarchy of the Kyivan metropolia lived under a Catholic king who wanted the union, in a commonwealth whose senate seated Latin bishops and no Orthodox ones, so the bishops had material reason to accept and material reason to fear refusing. After the union the Orthodox church in the Commonwealth lost its legal standing, much of its property passed to the united hierarchy, and an Orthodox hierarchy was restored only in 1620 and recognised in law only in 1632. At Uzhhorod in 1646 the same pattern held under Habsburg rule.

Second, they argue that uniatism divided living communities against themselves. A union agreed by bishops split parishes, families and monasteries, and produced two churches praying an identical liturgy in the same villages, one of them backed by the state. The Orthodox reading is that Rome did not receive a church into unity so much as detach a portion of one church from another.

Third, they argue that the promises made at union were not kept. The Eastern rite was guaranteed and then steadily Latinized, which Eastern Catholics themselves acknowledge, as section 9 sets out. Orthodox critics take that record as evidence that the union model tends inevitably toward absorption.

Fourth, and most fundamentally, they argue that uniatism embodies a false ecclesiology. It presents unity as the submission of Eastern Christians to the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, individually or in groups, rather than as reconciliation between two churches that would first have to resolve the questions dividing them. On this reading the Eastern Catholic churches are a standing proposal that the Orthodox should simply come over, and their existence makes the dialogue between equals impossible. Many Orthodox add a fifth point drawn from recent memory: after the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990, the restoration of Greek Catholic churches in western Ukraine and Romania involved bitter and sometimes violent disputes over church buildings that Orthodox congregations had been using for forty years.

The word "uniate," which outsiders use for these churches, carries all of that history. Eastern Catholics regard it as a slur and ask not to be called by it. Our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church sets out the Orthodox position on Rome more broadly.

The Catholic Response

The Catholic response begins by conceding a great deal. The historical record of coercion, of Latinization, and of unions negotiated in conditions of political inequality is largely admitted, and popes have said so. John Paul II asked forgiveness in general terms for the sins Catholics committed against Christian unity, and Catholic members of the joint theological commission signed a document at Balamand that repudiates the method by name.

What Catholics do not concede is the conclusion. Repudiating a method used in the past does not dissolve the churches that resulted from it, because those churches are now communities of living people with their own saints, their own martyrs and their own faith. Ukrainian Greek Catholics went into the catacombs for forty years rather than be absorbed into the Moscow Patriarchate, and a proposal that they should now be handed over is a proposal to overrule their own conscience. Catholic teaching holds that the freedom of the individual believer in matters of religion is inviolable (Dignitatis Humanae 2), and that principle protects an Orthodox Christian from Catholic pressure and an Eastern Catholic from Orthodox pressure equally.

Catholics also hold that these churches carry a positive vocation. A church that keeps the Byzantine liturgy, married clergy, its own synod and its own canon law, in communion with Rome, is evidence that communion with the Bishop of Rome does not require becoming Latin. Whether that evidence is convincing depends heavily on whether the Latinization described above is genuinely reversed, which is why the restoration in section 9 is not a matter of taste.

11. The 1993 Balamand Statement

The Balamand Statement is the joint document in which Catholic and Orthodox theologians said together that uniatism is no longer an acceptable method of seeking unity. It was agreed at the seventh plenary session of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, held at the Balamand School of Theology in Lebanon in June 1993, and its full title is Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion.

What the Document Says

Three commitments carry the document. The first is the rejection of the method: the commission states that uniatism, meaning the union of individuals or communities to Rome breaking with their own church, can no longer be accepted as a method to be followed or as a model for the unity the churches are seeking. The second is the mutual recognition of the two churches as Sister Churches, holding the same faith, the same sacraments and the same apostolic succession, which carries the consequence that neither may seek to convert the faithful of the other. Rebaptism is excluded, and pastoral activity is not to be aimed at drawing members away from the other church.

The third commitment is the one Orthodox critics of the document most often overlook and Catholics most often cite. The commission states plainly that the Eastern Catholic churches, as part of the Catholic communion, have the right to exist and to act to meet the spiritual needs of their faithful. Balamand rejects a method and protects the communities that method produced. It then sets out practical rules for coexistence: consultation between bishops of the two churches in the same territory, respect in the ownership of church property, an end to polemical use of history, and cooperation in catechesis and works of charity.

What Balamand Did Not Settle

The document has limited reception. It is the agreed text of a theological commission and not a definition binding either church, six Orthodox churches sent no delegation to the session, several have since declined to endorse the text, and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular has continued to press the objection in stronger terms. Some Orthodox theologians criticised it for conceding too much to Rome by the language of sister churches; some Eastern Catholics criticised it for discussing their churches as a problem to be managed while their own bishops were thinly represented at the table. The commission's later work moved on to the question underneath everything, the role of the Bishop of Rome in the first millennium, taken up in the Ravenna document of 2007 and the Chieti document of 2016.

12. The Twentieth-Century Persecution

The Eastern Catholic churches of Eastern Europe were suppressed by force under communist rule, and the memory of that suppression shapes how they see every proposal made to them today. The Soviet and satellite governments treated communion with Rome as loyalty to a foreign power, and the instrument of policy was forced absorption into the Orthodox churches under state control.

Ukraine and Romania

In March 1946 a gathering at Lviv, convened by Soviet authorities after the entire Ukrainian Greek Catholic episcopate had been arrested, declared the Union of Brest annulled and the church absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Church. No bishop of the church took part, which is why Ukrainian Greek Catholics refer to it as a pseudo-synod. The church was made illegal and continued underground for over forty years, with clandestine ordinations, liturgies in apartments and forests, and a hierarchy that operated in secret. In 1948 the Romanian Greek Catholic Church was suppressed in the same way, its bishops arrested, and its property transferred to the Romanian Orthodox Church.

The Cost in People

The cost was borne by named individuals. Josyf Slipyj, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, spent eighteen years in Soviet labour camps before Western intervention secured his release to Rome in 1963. Bishop Theodore Romzha of Mukachevo died in 1947 after an attack on his carriage and a subsequent poisoning in hospital; he was beatified in 2001. Pope John Paul II beatified a group of Ukrainian Greek Catholic martyrs of that period during his visit to Lviv in 2001. Romanian Greek Catholic bishops died in prison, and seven of them were beatified at Blaj in 2019.

The churches emerged in 1989 and 1990 and reclaimed their public existence quickly, which is where the property disputes described in section 10 arose. The buildings had been transferred to Orthodox parishes forty years earlier by a state neither community had chosen, and both congregations had legitimate grievances and legitimate attachments to the same church.

Persecution That Has Not Stopped

Eastern Catholics in the Middle East face a different and current danger. Chaldean Catholics in Iraq and Syriac Catholics in Syria and Iraq have been displaced in enormous numbers by two decades of war and by the campaign of the Islamic State against the Nineveh Plain in 2014. Coptic Catholics live alongside a Coptic Orthodox majority that has suffered repeated attacks on its churches. The Catholic Near East Welfare Association, the pontifical agency that reports on these churches, has documented the collapse of their numbers in Iraq and Syria across the last two decades. Ancient communities that survived every empire since Rome are far smaller in their homelands now than they were a generation ago. Pray for them by name.

13. Visiting an Eastern Catholic Parish

A Latin Catholic can attend an Eastern Catholic Divine Liturgy this Sunday, receive Communion, and fulfil the obligation, and doing so once teaches more than a month of reading. Eastern Catholic parishes exist in most large cities in North America, Australia and Western Europe, usually under names like Byzantine Catholic, Ukrainian Catholic, Maronite, Melkite, Syro-Malabar or Chaldean.

Practical Notes for a First Visit

• You will stand. Kneeling is uncommon in the Byzantine tradition on Sundays and forbidden in the Paschal season. Follow the congregation.
• Communion is by spoon. The consecrated leavened bread is placed in the chalice; you tilt your head back, give your baptismal name, and do not touch the spoon.
• Everything is sung. Bring nothing to read. Listen for the litanies and answer "Lord, have mercy" with everyone else.
• Venerate the icons. A bow and a kiss on the hands or feet of the figure is the normal gesture on entering.
• The service runs long. Ninety minutes is typical for a Byzantine Sunday liturgy, longer on feasts.
• You remain a Latin Catholic. Attending does not change your church of enrolment, which is a canonical status transferred only with permission of the Holy See.

What Latins Owe the Eastern Churches

Three things, and the Council named all of them. Accurate knowledge, since Orientalium Ecclesiarum 4 asks that those who deal with the Eastern churches and their faithful be instructed in their rites, discipline and history. Respect for their self-government, which means not treating Eastern practice as a variation on Latin practice awaiting correction. Prayer and material support for churches under persecution, which for the Chaldean, Syriac, Coptic and Melkite faithful is a present emergency rather than a memory.

These churches are also a standing answer to a question many Catholics and many Orthodox ask sincerely: whether communion with Rome requires the surrender of an ancient tradition. Twenty-three churches with their own synods, their own liturgies, their own married priests and their own canon law say that it does not. Whether the answer persuades depends on how faithfully those churches are allowed to be themselves, which is why the recovery of Eastern tradition described above is the most important ecumenical work most Catholics have never heard of.

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