The Eastern Catholic Churches in America

Contemporary Review, April, 2004 by Daniel P. Grigassy

IF YOU have ever driven through the 'Rust Belt' in the northeastern and north-central United States, that territory dominated by steel mills and coal mines, you are likely to notice, especially near urban areas, the gold or silver domes topped by equally unusual three-barred crosses. These onion-domed churches that punctuate several cityscapes belong to the so-called Eastern Churches still functioning and even thriving as places of worship. You may have seen inside one, even if only through the wedding scene in the film The Deerhunter.

What you are seeing in these churches is a reflection of the long tradition of Eastern Christianity, in both its Orthodox Christian and Byzantine Catholic variants. The people who attend them are first-generation immigrants or more likely their second and third generation descendants. Their ancestors were known as Rusyns or Rusnaks, mostly Slavs from the Carpathian Mountain regions in east-central Europe, now in western Ukraine and eastern Slovakia. Through the centuries they acquired a whole host of names given to them by others or adopted by themselves. Herein lies only one reason for the 'byzantine' nature of Byzantine Christianity. Confusion of identities during the first waves of immigration complicated their reception. Are these people who still worship in these churches Orthodox Christians (not in union with Rome) or are they Catholics, Byzantine Catholics, or (sometimes wrongly called) Greek Catholics (in union with Rome)? (The term 'Uniate', created by Irish hierarchs, is inaccurate and considered very offensive by most Eastern Catholics. While the term 'Greek' Catholic is still commonly used, most 'Byzantine' Catholics find it pejorative. I will here use 'Greek' and 'Byzantine' interchangeably along with the more generic 'Eastern' Catholics.)

From Byzantine to Roman Catholic

Over the last twenty-one years as a teacher of liturgy in Roman Catholic theological colleges, as a lecturer to adult education series in Roman Catholic parishes, and simply as a participant in talks about the Catholic Church with other Roman Catholics, it seems that, whenever I ask them to consider Christian churches other than their own, more often than not, they immediately refer to the Reformation churches and the free church traditions of today. Less often do they mention the Orthodox churches, the Oriental churches, the churches of the East, and even less often do they have within their scope the Eastern Catholic churches, those Eastern churches in union with Rome. Forty years ago, the Second Vatican Council issued the Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches (Orientalium Ecclesiarum, 21 November 1964), affirming Eastern Catholics and urging Latin Catholics to accept them as real Catholics. Yet still so many Roman Catholics are shocked to discover that not everyone worships on Sundays in the same way that they do, that not all Catholics use the same liturgical practices, that some Eastern Catholic priests are married with families, and that all of these differences are indeed 'approved by Rome.'

This jolt of insight on so many faces has always intrigued me because the awareness of the Christian East and West, especially the Catholic East and West, has always been part of my world view. In the early years in Roman Catholic primary schools, my identity was 'Greek Catholic,' although there was nothing 'Greek' about me. Confusion arose for my classmates, all Roman Catholics and children and grandchildren of western European immigrants. Their ancestors dominated the American cultural scene in the post-war years of expansion in the late 1940s and through the 1950s. I came on the scene in 1950, was baptized a 'Greek' Catholic, and later came to understand myself more correctly as a Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic. I had two 'first' communions, one at my grandfather's church and one at the Latin church attached to the school in the suburbs. Only on special feasts such as Christmas and Easter did we participate in Byzantine liturgies. When the call to religious life and priesthood made itself known to me, I moved directly to a Roman Catholic seminary. Ordination could take place only after a canonical procedure which dissolved my relationship with the Catholic East. That 'change of rite' freed me to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest.

My situation was not unique. Most children of Greek Catholic parents were put into Catholic schools in the 1950s, and therefore appropriated Roman Catholic identities. Convenience drove this choice. To send children to new and burgeoning Catholic city and suburban schools staffed by armies of nuns was simply easier than to send them across town to a small Greek Catholic school. Not only did convenience drive this choice, but an infectious inferiority complex set in because Greek Catholics were not regarded as 'real' Catholics. The real Catholics, most of whom looked very Irish, called us 'Uniates,' those renegade Orthodox who finally saw the true light and returned to Holy Mother Rome. An added feature that heightened suspicions about these 'Greeks' was that they looked all too Russian. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when McCarthyism was rife, one did not want to sport that image and so Greek Catholics 'latinized.'