Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

1. What the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Is

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is a self-governing church of the Byzantine tradition in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, with its own bishops, its own canon law and its own liturgy in Ukrainian. Its members are Catholics who worship in the rite of Constantinople as their ancestors in Kyiv did, and its head is the Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych. It descends from the Union of Brest, agreed in 1595 and proclaimed at Brest in 1596, when most of the Orthodox hierarchy of the Kyivan metropolia entered communion with Rome on terms that guaranteed the Byzantine rite, the Church Slavonic liturgy and the married priesthood.

The phrase Greek Catholic is a piece of eighteenth-century Habsburg administration that stuck. Empress Maria Theresa ordered in 1774 that these Christians be called Greek Catholics rather than Uniates, the older term having become an insult, and Greek in the phrase means Byzantine in rite rather than Greek in nationality or language. A Ukrainian Greek Catholic is Ukrainian by nation, Byzantine by rite, and Catholic by communion.

By membership the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the largest of the Eastern Catholic churches, with its historic heartland in Galicia and western Ukraine and large communities in Poland, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and western Europe. Numbers reported for it vary widely between sources, and this page gives none, because a church driven underground for four decades and scattered by emigration and war has no count that can be given with confidence.

The ranking above follows the membership figures published annually by the Holy See in the Annuario Pontificio, which is the source ordinarily used for the relative size of the Eastern Catholic churches. The Syro-Malabar Church is of comparable size and is the next largest.

2. Byzantine Worship in Communion With Rome

A Ukrainian Greek Catholic service is the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, sung from beginning to end, celebrated behind and through an iconostasis, in Ukrainian and in some parishes in Church Slavonic or English. A Catholic who has only ever seen the Roman Mass will recognise very little of the shape and all of the substance. The bread is leavened, the faithful stand, the priest is often bearded, the congregation crosses itself from right to left, and communion is given to infants from the day of their baptism.

What Happens in the Liturgy

The liturgy opens with the blessing of the kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, moves through the Great Litany, the antiphons and the Little Entrance with the Gospel book, the readings, the Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance carrying the gifts to the altar, the Creed, the anaphora with its epiclesis calling down the Holy Spirit on the gifts, the Our Father, and communion given on a spoon under both kinds. The sacrifice offered is the same sacrifice offered at a Roman altar, and the Eucharist received is the same Eucharist, a point our guide to the Eucharist treats in full.

Sacraments Given Together

Ukrainian Greek Catholic practice gives baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist together in one service to an infant, which is the ancient order kept everywhere in the Christian East. Chrismation is the Eastern form of what Latin Catholics call confirmation, and it is administered by the priest with chrism blessed by the bishop rather than reserved to the bishop himself. A child baptised in a Ukrainian Greek Catholic parish is therefore a communicant from infancy, and the Latin sequence of first communion around the age of seven and confirmation years later has no place in the Eastern order.

The Calendar and the Cycle

The liturgical year runs on the Byzantine cycle, beginning on 1 September, built around Pascha and the twelve great feasts, with long fasting seasons before Pascha and Christmas and shorter ones in the year. Ukrainian Greek Catholic eparchies have differed among themselves on whether to keep the Julian or the Gregorian reckoning for fixed feasts, and the church has moved in recent years toward the new calendar, which places the Nativity on 25 December. Our guide to the liturgical calendar sets out the Western year for comparison.

Rite Is Not Doctrine

The Second Vatican Council settled the principle behind all of this in the decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum of 1964, which teaches that the Eastern churches in communion with Rome are of equal dignity with the Latin Church, that none is superior to the others by reason of rite, and that these churches should keep their own traditions and, where they have drifted, restore their ancestral usages. That last instruction mattered a great deal in practice. Centuries of proximity to Latin Catholicism had introduced Latin devotions, Latin vestments, low Masses, the rosary and even organs into some Greek Catholic parishes, and the work of the past sixty years has been to return the liturgy to its Byzantine form.

3. The Kyivan Inheritance Before the Union

The Christianity of Ukraine begins with the baptism of Kyivan Rus under Prince Volodymyr in 988, when the ruler of Kyiv received baptism from Byzantium and his people with him. The church that resulted was Byzantine in liturgy, Slavonic in language, and organised as the Metropolitanate of Kyiv under the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. That inheritance is claimed by Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Greek Catholics alike, and by the Russian Orthodox Church as well, and much of the argument this page describes is an argument about who is the heir.

The Metropolitanate Fragments

The Mongol destruction of Kyiv in 1240 broke the centre of the church, and the metropolitans moved north, first to Vladimir and then to Moscow, while the lands that became Ukraine and Belarus passed to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1448 the bishops in Moscow elected a metropolitan without reference to Constantinople, and Moscow was recognised as a patriarchate in 1589. The metropolitan see of Kyiv continued separately under Constantinople, and its bishops found themselves a Byzantine church inside a Catholic state.

The Pressures of the Sixteenth Century

Three pressures bore on the Kyivan hierarchy at the end of the sixteenth century, and honest accounts name all three. Orthodox bishops in the Commonwealth held a legally inferior position beside Latin bishops, who sat in the senate and enjoyed the full protection of the state. The internal life of the Orthodox church there was contested by lay brotherhoods, which held charters from Constantinople giving them oversight of clergy and which the bishops experienced as an assault on episcopal authority. And the newly established Patriarchate of Moscow had an obvious interest in absorbing Kyiv, which several bishops feared more than they feared Rome. Catholic reform after the Council of Trent supplied the other half of the picture, with Jesuit colleges and a confident Latin hierarchy pressing the case for union.

4. The Union of Brest, 1595 and 1596

The Union of Brest is the act by which most of the bishops of the Kyivan metropolia entered full communion with Rome while keeping the Byzantine rite. In 1595 the bishops drew up thirty-three articles setting their terms, and two of them, Hypatius Pociej of Volodymyr and Cyril Terlecky of Lutsk, carried the articles to Rome, where Pope Clement VIII received them into communion in December 1595 by the bull Magnus Dominus et Laudabilis Nimis. A synod at Brest in October 1596, presided over by Metropolitan Michael Rohoza, proclaimed the union in the metropolia itself.

What the Bishops Asked For

The articles asked Rome to guarantee the things the bishops were not willing to lose. The Byzantine liturgy and calendar were to be kept unchanged. Priests were to go on being married men as before. The metropolitan and bishops were to be elected in the customary way and confirmed by the Pope. The Creed was to be recited without the Filioque, and the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit was handled by accepting the Latin doctrine while leaving the Greek text of the Creed alone. Communion under both kinds and the Slavonic language were to continue. Rome accepted the terms, and the pattern set at Brest became the model for later unions.

The Opposition, and Two Synods at Once

The union was rejected by a substantial part of the church it was meant to unite, and any account that leaves this out is worthless. Two bishops, Gedeon Balaban of Lviv and Mykhailo Kopystensky of Peremyshl, repudiated their earlier consent. The most powerful Orthodox layman in the Commonwealth, Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky, opposed the union outright, as did the lay brotherhoods and most of the monasteries. When the synod met at Brest in October 1596, an opposing synod met in the same town at the same time, with the exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarch present, and it deposed the bishops who had gone over to Rome. Each assembly anathematised the other.

What followed was not a peaceful settlement. The Commonwealth recognised only the united hierarchy for a generation, and the Orthodox who refused the union were left without a legal hierarchy until Patriarch Theophanes III of Jerusalem consecrated bishops for them in 1620, an act the state at first treated as illegal. Peter Mohyla, Orthodox Metropolitan of Kyiv from 1633, rebuilt Orthodox institutions and founded the academy that carries his name. From then until the partitions, two churches claimed the Kyivan inheritance in the same territory, and the wound described in section 10 dates from here.

Josaphat Kuntsevych

The violence of the period produced a saint whose story is told very differently on the two sides. Josaphat Kuntsevych, the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Polotsk, was killed by a mob at Vitebsk in 1623 during a dispute over churches in his eparchy. Rome canonised him in 1867 and he is honoured by Ukrainian Greek Catholics as a martyr for unity. Orthodox accounts of the same man describe an aggressive enforcer of the union who closed Orthodox churches, and Ukrainian Greek Catholic historians do not all deny that he was severe. The fair place to leave it is the principle the Catholic Church itself stated three centuries later at Balamand, described in section 11: unity is sought by persuasion, and the coercive means used in the seventeenth century are means the Church would not use now.

5. Galicia Under Austria, and Suppression Under the Tsars

The partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century divided the Greek Catholic church between two empires, and its fate in each was opposite. Galicia, with Lviv at its centre, passed to Habsburg Austria in 1772, where the church was tolerated, funded and eventually made into the leading institution of Ukrainian national life. The eparchies that fell to the Russian Empire were dismantled.

Austria: Legal Standing and a National Role

Habsburg policy under Maria Theresa and Joseph II placed the Greek Catholic clergy on a legal footing with the Latin clergy, opened seminaries for them at Vienna and Lviv, and gave them state salaries. The metropolitan see of Halych was restored in 1808 with its seat at Lviv. Because Ukrainian speakers in Galicia had almost no nobility of their own, the parish priest and his family became the educated class, and the church carried the literary language, the schools, the reading rooms, the cooperatives and eventually the political parties. That is why the Soviet state later treated the church as a national movement rather than a religious body, and it explains the severity of what came in 1946.

The Russian Empire: Polotsk 1839 and Chelm 1875

In the territories taken by Russia the Greek Catholic church was abolished. After the suppression of most of its monasteries and the steady removal of its bishops, a synod at Polotsk in 1839 declared the union at an end and transferred the Greek Catholics of Belarus and Lithuania to the Russian Orthodox Church. The eparchy of Chelm, the last remaining Greek Catholic jurisdiction in the empire, was suppressed in 1875, and resistance in the villages of Podlasie was met with force. Ukrainian Greek Catholics point to 1839 and 1875 when they are told that the events of 1946 were an internal Orthodox matter, because the same instrument had been used twice before.

6. Sheptytsky and Slipyj

Two men shaped the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of the twentieth century, and the church cannot be described without them. Andrey Sheptytsky was Metropolitan of Lviv from 1901 until his death in 1944. Josyf Slipyj, his successor, led the church through arrest, eighteen years in Soviet camps, and exile in Rome.

Andrey Sheptytsky

Sheptytsky came from a Polonised aristocratic family, returned deliberately to the Greek Catholic church of his ancestors, became a Basilian monk, and was appointed Metropolitan of Lviv in 1901. He restored the Byzantine character of the liturgy against the Latinising habits of the previous century, founded the Ukrainian Catholic Theological Academy, built up the studite monastic tradition, funded schools, hospitals and the National Museum in Lviv, and worked for reconciliation with Orthodox Christians at a time when almost nobody was doing so. He governed under Austria, under Poland, under Soviet occupation and under German occupation, and was imprisoned by the Russian imperial authorities during the First World War.

His conduct during the Holocaust is documented and it is the reason his name is known outside Ukraine. He wrote to Heinrich Himmler in 1942 protesting the murder of Jews and the use of Ukrainian auxiliaries in it. In November 1942 he issued the pastoral letter Thou Shalt Not Kill, which condemned murder without qualification at a time when saying so carried obvious risk. He and his brother Klymentiy organised the hiding of Jewish children and adults in monasteries, convents and in the metropolitan's own residence, and Rabbi David Kahane, who was among those sheltered, wrote afterwards about it. Klymentiy Sheptytsky was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, and the case for Andrey has been debated there without a decision in his favour, largely because of statements he made welcoming the German advance in 1941 before the character of the occupation was clear. His cause for canonisation is open, and he was declared venerable in 2015.

The recognition of Klymentiy Sheptytsky as Righteous Among the Nations is recorded by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. The 1942 pastoral letter Thou Shalt Not Kill and the letter to Himmler are published documents of the Lviv metropolitanate.

Josyf Slipyj

Slipyj was rector of the theological academy in Lviv and was consecrated as Sheptytsky's coadjutor in 1939, succeeding him in November 1944. In April 1945 the Soviet security services arrested him along with every other Greek Catholic bishop in Soviet Ukraine. He was sentenced to forced labour and spent eighteen years in camps and internal exile in Siberia and Mordovia, refusing throughout to renounce communion with Rome or to join the Russian Orthodox Church. He was released in 1963 after diplomatic efforts involving Pope John XXIII and the United States government, went to Rome, took part in the Second Vatican Council, and was created a cardinal by Paul VI in 1965. He founded the Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome, campaigned for the recognition of his church as a patriarchate, and died in Rome in 1984. His remains were returned to Lviv in 1992 and lie in St George's Cathedral.

7. The Lviv Pseudo-Sobor of 1946

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was liquidated by the Soviet state through the machinery of a church council. Western Ukraine came under Soviet control at the end of the Second World War. In April 1945 the security services arrested the entire Greek Catholic episcopate, Metropolitan Slipyj among them, leaving the church with no bishop at liberty. A body calling itself the Initiative Group for the Reunion of the Greek Catholic Church with the Orthodox Church was then formed under the priest Havryil Kostelnyk and recognised by the state as the sole lawful authority over Greek Catholic parishes.

What Happened at Lviv in March 1946

The gathering met in St George's Cathedral in Lviv from 8 to 10 March 1946. It declared the Union of Brest of 1596 annulled, broke with Rome, and placed the Greek Catholic church of Galicia into the Russian Orthodox Church. Not one Greek Catholic bishop took part, because all of them were in prison. Priests attended under duress, many having been told plainly what refusal would cost, and the two clerics who were consecrated as bishops for the occasion had been ordained in the Orthodox church shortly before. Ukrainian Greek Catholics call the event a pseudo-sobor and hold its acts void for want of any canonical authority to perform them. Kostelnyk was shot dead in Lviv in 1948, and the circumstances have never been established.

The Same Method Elsewhere

The pattern was repeated across the region. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church was suppressed in 1948 and its property transferred to the Romanian Orthodox Church, with its bishops dying in prison. In Transcarpathia the eparchy of Mukachevo, which belongs to the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church and not to the Ukrainian one, was liquidated in 1949; its bishop, Theodore Romzha, had died in 1947 after his carriage was rammed and he was finished off in hospital, and he was beatified in 2001. Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia were forcibly reunited to Orthodoxy in 1950.

The Cost

Bishops, priests, monks, nuns and lay leaders were deported, imprisoned and killed. Pope John Paul II beatified twenty-seven Ukrainian Greek Catholic martyrs of the Soviet period during his visit to Lviv in June 2001, among them the bishops Mykola Charnetsky, Vasyl Velychkovsky, Hryhorii Khomyshyn, Yosafat Kotsylovsky and Symeon Lukach, and the priest Omelian Kovch, who died at Majdanek in 1944. Naming them matters, because the church's own account of the twentieth century is an account of witnesses under interrogation who did not sign.

8. Forty Years in the Catacombs

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church continued illegally from 1946 to 1989, with no legal existence anywhere in the Soviet Union. Bishops were consecrated in secret, priests were ordained in apartments, and the Divine Liturgy was celebrated in kitchens, in forests, in cemeteries and in prison camps. Many clergy worked ordinary jobs and served their parishes at night. Some priests who had signed in 1946 continued to serve Greek Catholics privately while functioning publicly as Orthodox, a compromise that the church afterwards judged with a good deal of mercy.

How the Hierarchy Survived

Clandestine succession was maintained deliberately. Vasyl Velychkovsky was consecrated a bishop in secret in 1963, arrested again in 1969, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, dying in Winnipeg the following year. Volodymyr Sterniuk, consecrated in secret in 1964, governed the underground church in Lviv through the 1970s and 1980s and led it into the open in 1989 as an old man. The studite and Basilian monastic communities kept forming novices without buildings. Religious sisters ran an entire catechetical network in private homes.

Samvydav and the Human Rights Movement

From the mid-1970s the underground church overlapped with the Soviet dissident movement. Clandestine religious literature circulated in typescript, and in 1982 an Initiative Group for the Defence of the Rights of Believers and the Church was founded by Yosyp Terelya to press for legalisation publicly, and was led after him by Vasyl Kobryn, with the predictable result that both were imprisoned. Petitions were gathered in the parishes and sent to Moscow through the 1980s. The demand was always the same, that the church be allowed to register and exist.

9. Legalisation in 1989 and the Return to Kyiv

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church came out of the catacombs in 1989. Through that summer and autumn Greek Catholics demonstrated openly in Lviv, celebrated public liturgies, and staged a hunger strike on the Arbat in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev met Pope John Paul II at the Vatican on 1 December 1989, and within days the Soviet authorities in Ukraine announced that Greek Catholic communities could register with the state. Registration was the whole battle, because a registered community could hold a building.

The Struggle Over Parishes

What followed was a bitter contest for church buildings in Galicia, and it is the single largest grievance the Moscow Patriarchate holds against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The churches that Greek Catholics reclaimed were the churches taken from them in 1946 and given to the Russian Orthodox Church, and by 1989 they had been served by Orthodox clergy for over forty years with Orthodox congregations attending them. In many villages the whole parish voted to return to Greek Catholic use and the Orthodox priest was left without a building. In others the community was split, and there were forced entries, standoffs and fights. Ukrainian Greek Catholics describe the process as restitution of stolen property. Moscow describes it as the violent seizure of Orthodox churches. Both descriptions fit some of what happened, and a joint commission set up in 1990 to settle the disputes collapsed within months.

Rebuilding, and the Move to Kyiv

Cardinal Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky, who had led the church from Rome after Slipyj's death, returned to Lviv in March 1991, and the first synod of bishops on Ukrainian soil in half a century met that year. Seminaries reopened, the theological academy in Lviv was refounded and became the Ukrainian Catholic University in 2002, and eparchies were erected across Ukraine and in the diaspora. Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, elected head of the church in 2001, moved its seat from Lviv to Kyiv, with the title of the head changed to Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych in 2005 and the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection built on the left bank of the Dnipro. Sviatoslav Shevchuk was elected Major Archbishop in March 2011 and has led the church since.

The move to Kyiv was a claim about identity. Ukrainian Greek Catholics hold that they are the church of Kyiv and not a regional church of Galicia, and that the see of Kyiv is theirs by inheritance from the metropolia that entered the union in 1596. The Moscow Patriarchate read the move as an invasion of its canonical territory and protested it formally, and Patriarch Alexy II made it a condition of any papal visit to Russia.

10. The Moscow Objection, Stated Fairly

The Moscow Patriarchate objects to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church at the level of its legitimacy rather than its behaviour. The objection deserves to be set out as its holders state it, because a Catholic who cannot state it accurately is in no position to answer it.

The Argument as Moscow Makes It

On the Russian Orthodox account, the Kyivan metropolia was an Orthodox church under the Ecumenical Patriarch, and the Union of Brest removed it from Orthodoxy by an act of a handful of bishops acting against the will of their own clergy, monasteries, brotherhoods and lay nobility, under pressure from a Catholic state that offered the bishops legal privileges. The union was rejected by an opposing synod at Brest in the same month. What was created, on this reading, is a body detached from its own communion by political means, whose whole purpose was to draw Orthodox Christians into the Roman obedience while leaving their liturgy in place as a device to make the change palatable. The Orthodox term for that device is uniatism, and it is used as an accusation.

Moscow adds a second argument from the twentieth century. It holds that the Greek Catholic parishes of Galicia were reunited to Orthodoxy in 1946 by the free decision of their own clergy, that the Orthodox communities which grew up in those churches over four decades were real communities of real believers, and that the campaign of 1989 to 1992 turned those believers out of their churches. It holds that Kyiv is its own canonical territory by the transfer of the metropolia to Moscow's jurisdiction in 1686, and that a Greek Catholic patriarchal cathedral in Kyiv is an act of expansion. It also holds the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church responsible for hardening Ukrainian religious life against Russia. Moscow made the Greek Catholic question a standing condition in the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue and withdrew from sessions over it.

What Is True in It

Parts of the objection are simply true and Catholics should say so. The Union of Brest was carried by bishops without the consent of much of their church, in a state that rewarded the decision, and it split a church that had been one. The seventeenth century saw coercion used in the union's favour, and the Commonwealth's refusal to recognise an Orthodox hierarchy for a generation was a real injustice. The recovery of parishes after 1989 involved incidents that no one should defend. Pope John Paul II acknowledged the general shape of this in his letters on the Eastern churches, and the phrase used at Balamand, that uniatism can no longer be accepted as a method, was a Catholic concession and not a courtesy.

What Is Not

The claim that the 1946 gathering at Lviv was a free decision of the clergy does not survive the facts of April 1945. Every bishop of the church had been arrested before the meeting was called, the organising body was created and recognised by the Soviet security apparatus, and the state used deportation as the alternative to signature. Nor does the argument establish what it needs to establish, which is that a church of living believers should be dissolved because of how their ancestors' bishops behaved four centuries ago. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church now consists of people who were born into it, who chose it under persecution, and whose own consciences are the thing at stake.

11. The Catholic Answer, and Balamand 1993

The Catholic answer to the Moscow objection was given formally at Balamand in Lebanon in June 1993, when the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church issued the statement Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion. The document does two things at once, and quoting only one half of it misrepresents it.

What Balamand Conceded

The commission agreed that the method of seeking unity by detaching communities from one church and attaching them to another, the method used in the unions of the past, can no longer be accepted as a way to full communion. It rejected rebaptism, proselytism among the faithful of the other church, and the use of civil power to settle religious questions. It affirmed that the Catholic and Orthodox churches recognise one another as sister churches holding valid sacraments and apostolic succession, and it asked both sides to stop competing for the same people.

What Balamand Affirmed

In the same text the commission stated that the Eastern Catholic churches which came into being through those unions have the right to exist and to act in answer to the spiritual needs of their faithful. That sentence is the operative one for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. A method judged unacceptable for the future does not annul the communities it produced, because those communities are now made of people with their own martyrs, their own bishops and their own faith, and no one may be moved from one church to another against his will.

The principle underneath is the Second Vatican Council's teaching on religious freedom in Dignitatis Humanae, that the human person has a right to immunity from coercion in religious matters, and that this right belongs to the person and not to the institution that would like to hold him. It protects an Orthodox Christian against Catholic pressure and a Greek Catholic against Orthodox pressure in exactly the same measure. For the wider Catholic approach to Christian unity, see our guide to ecumenism, and for the Orthodox side of the dialogue in its own terms, our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Patriarchate Question

One Catholic decision points the other way, and it should be named. Ukrainian Greek Catholics have asked since Slipyj's time for their church to be recognised as a patriarchate, which would put it on the highest grade of self-government. Rome has not granted the request, and the reason usually given by Vatican officials is the effect such a step would have on relations with the Orthodox, above all with Moscow. Many Ukrainian Greek Catholics regard that as their own church being held hostage to a dialogue it did not join. The church already functions with a patriarchal structure in its internal life, and the head is addressed as Patriarch by many of the faithful without the title being conceded.

12. Married Priests and How the Discipline Works

A married man can be ordained a priest in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and most parish priests in Ukraine are married. This is the ancient discipline of the Christian East, kept unbroken since the first centuries, guaranteed to the church in the articles of 1595, and recognised in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1580, which notes that a different discipline has been in force in the Eastern churches for many centuries.

The Rules, Stated Precisely

The order of events is fixed and it runs one way. A man marries and is then ordained. A man ordained while unmarried does not marry afterwards, and a priest whose wife dies does not remarry. Bishops are chosen from among celibate clergy, in practice from monastics, which is the universal Eastern rule. The wife of a priest holds a recognised place in parish life and carries a title of her own, panimatka in Ukrainian usage. Candidates are free to choose celibacy, and a good number do, so the church has both married and celibate parish clergy side by side.

Why the Latin Church Differs

The Latin Church requires celibacy of its priests as a discipline rather than a doctrine, a point our guide to the Catholic priesthood works through. The Eastern practice is evidence that the requirement is a discipline, since two disciplines run inside one communion without either church accusing the other of error. Catholic teaching on marriage as a sacrament is identical in both. The speculative question of whether Latin practice will change belongs to our guide to the future of the Church, which touches it in a sentence; this page is about the church that has ordained married men without interruption for four hundred years.

The Twentieth-Century Restriction and Its Reversal

Married Eastern clergy were barred from the Americas and Australia for most of the twentieth century. Latin bishops in the United States objected to married priests serving alongside their own celibate clergy, and Rome responded with the decree Ea Semper in 1907 and then Cum Data Fuerit in 1929, which effectively prohibited married Eastern priests from ministering there. The consequence is a matter of record: large numbers of Greek Catholic parishes in North America left communion with Rome for the Orthodox Church, a movement associated above all with the Carpatho-Rusyn priest Alexis Toth, who was refused faculties by the Latin archbishop of Saint Paul and who is now canonised by the Orthodox Church in America. In June 2014 the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, with the approval of Pope Francis, issued a pontifical decree permitting the Eastern Catholic churches to ordain married men outside their traditional territories, which ended the restriction after more than a century.

13. How the Church Governs Itself

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church governs itself through a synod of its own bishops under a major archbishop, within the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches promulgated by John Paul II in 1990. A major archbishop holds substantially the powers of a patriarch, with one difference at the top: after his synod elects him, he must be confirmed in office by the Pope before enthronement, where a patriarch is enthroned first and then asks for ecclesiastical communion.

The Synod and the Eparchies

The Synod of Bishops is the governing body. It elects bishops for eparchies within the church's own territory, legislates the particular law of the church, and elects the major archbishop. Below it sit metropolitan provinces, eparchies (the Eastern term for a diocese) and exarchates, in Ukraine and across the diaspora. The archeparchy of Kyiv is the seat of the major archbishop and the archeparchy of Lviv remains the historic centre, with major concentrations of parishes in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Sambir-Drohobych and Kolomyia.

Monasticism and Formation

Byzantine monasticism runs through the church's life. The Order of St Basil the Great is its oldest and largest institute, and the Studite monks, revived by Andrey and Klymentiy Sheptytsky, keep a rule drawn from the ancient monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople. The Redemptorists of the Byzantine rite have been prominent since the early twentieth century and supplied several of the underground bishops. The Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv is the church's principal centre of study, and the university describes itself as the first Catholic university to open in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Relations With the Latin Church in Ukraine

A Latin Catholic hierarchy also exists in Ukraine, with its own dioceses serving largely Polish-descended communities, and the two Catholic churches coexist as parallel structures in the same country. Every Catholic belongs to one of the twenty-four self-governing churches, ordinarily by enrolment at baptism, and transferring from one to another requires the consent of the Holy See. A Latin Catholic may attend a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Divine Liturgy, receive communion there and fulfil the Sunday obligation, which is the simplest way to understand what full communion means in practice. Our guide to the Mass explains the Latin form of the same sacrifice.

14. Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox Compared

Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians share the liturgy, the calendar shape, the icons, the married clergy and the Kyivan inheritance, and they differ over communion with Rome and the doctrines that follow from it. A visitor at both liturgies on consecutive Sundays would hear the same hymns and notice that the Catholic one commemorates the Pope.

The Orthodox Landscape in Ukraine

Orthodoxy in Ukraine has its own divisions, and they should be described accurately before any comparison. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine received a tomos of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in January 2019, a grant the Moscow Patriarchate rejects as invalid, and Moscow broke eucharistic communion with Constantinople over it in 2018. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, historically the self-governing body under the Moscow Patriarchate, declared its full independence from Moscow at a council in May 2022, and its canonical status is contested. Our guide to the Great Schism of 1054 covers the older division between East and West that stands behind all of this.

Point by Point

The doctrinal rows follow the Catholic position as taught by the Catholic Church and the Orthodox position as commonly stated by Orthodox theologians. Orthodox churches govern themselves individually, so no single body speaks for all of them, and practice varies. The liturgical rows describe usual practice rather than binding rules.

What a Visitor Would Actually See

The visible differences are small. In a Greek Catholic liturgy the deacon commemorates the Pope of Rome by name along with the major archbishop and the local bishop, and in an Orthodox liturgy he does not. Greek Catholic parishes may have a Latin devotion in the building, a rosary group, or an image in a Western style, which decades of liturgical renewal have reduced. Beyond that, the vestments, the chant, the iconostasis, the fasting rules, the blessing of water at Theophany and the Easter baskets are the same on both sides of the divide, which is exactly why the two communities have been able to argue over the same buildings.

15. The Diaspora

A large part of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church lives outside Ukraine, and it has done so since the 1880s. Emigration from Galicia and Transcarpathia carried Greek Catholics to Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and later to Australia and western Europe, and the church followed them with parishes, eparchies and, from 1912 in Canada, its own bishops. During the Soviet decades the diaspora carried the church's public existence, publishing its liturgical books, training its clergy and pressing its case in Rome and in Western capitals while the church at home was illegal.

Where the Communities Are

Ukrainian Greek Catholic structures exist across the Americas and in Australia, with metropolitan provinces in Canada, the United States and Brazil, an eparchy in Argentina, and eparchies and exarchates in Poland, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The Polish structures serve a Ukrainian minority whose position was disrupted by the forced resettlements of the late 1940s. In Britain and Italy the parishes have been reshaped by more recent labour migration, and in Italy in particular the congregations are heavily made up of Ukrainian workers of the past twenty-five years.

What the Diaspora Preserved and What It Lost

The diaspora kept the Ukrainian language, the chant, the calendar and the seminaries alive, and it argued for decades for the patriarchate. It also carried the effects of the restriction on married clergy described in section 12, which cost it a large number of parishes to Orthodoxy in the first half of the twentieth century and left a permanent mark on the religious map of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the industrial Midwest. A second problem is ordinary assimilation: parishes founded by immigrant miners in the 1900s serve grandchildren who speak English, and English-language liturgies and mixed marriages have followed. The church in the diaspora now sits between two constituencies, the descendants of the old emigration and recent arrivals from Ukraine.

For a Catholic in North America or Australia the practical point is simple. A Ukrainian Catholic parish is a Catholic parish. Attending its Divine Liturgy on a Sunday satisfies the obligation, communion may be received there, and it is the fastest way to learn what the Christian East actually does. Parishes are usually listed under Ukrainian Catholic or Byzantine Catholic rather than under the local Latin diocese.

16. Where the Church Stands Now

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church stands as a fully restored church with its seat in Kyiv, a working synod, a university, seminaries, monasteries and a worldwide diaspora, and it stands in the middle of the hardest question in the Catholic-Orthodox relationship. Its right to exist was affirmed at Balamand and is denied in substance by the Moscow Patriarchate. Its request for a patriarchate has not been granted. Its parishes in Ukraine work under the conditions of a country at war since the full-scale invasion of 2022, with clergy in chaplaincy, in displaced-persons work and in relief.

What Is Actually Settled

Three things are settled and worth stating plainly. The church is Catholic, with the same faith and the same sacraments as any Roman parish, and the Second Vatican Council teaches that its rite is of equal dignity with the Latin rite (Orientalium Ecclesiarum 3). Its married priesthood is legitimate and ancient, recognised in CCC 1580, and no longer restricted in the diaspora after the 2014 decree. Its martyrs are recognised, twenty-seven of them beatified by John Paul II at Lviv in 2001.

What Is Not Settled

The legitimacy dispute with Moscow is not settled and will not be settled by argument about 1596. The patriarchate is not granted. The relationship between Greek Catholics and the several Orthodox bodies in Ukraine is worked out parish by parish rather than by any agreement at the top, and relations with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine have generally been better than relations with Moscow. Whether the Kyivan church can ever be reunited across the division of 1596, an idea Ukrainian Greek Catholic theologians have raised more than once, remains an aspiration with no mechanism behind it.

What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Stop calling these Christians Uniates, which is a slur in the mouths of the people who use it. Learn that Catholic does not mean Latin. Attend a Divine Liturgy and stand through it. State the Orthodox objection accurately before answering it, and concede the parts of it that are true. Pray for the unity Christ asked for the night before he died, and pray for the Christians of Ukraine by name.

17. Related Topics