The Eastern Catholic Churches in America

Contemporary Review, April, 2004 by Daniel P. Grigassy

During decades of revolution and unrest, the Orthodox Church achieved an uneasy accommodation with the Soviet state while persecution of the Catholic churches, both Eastern and Western, was relentless. By the end of the 1930s, only two Catholic churches were functioning in Russia, and terrible injustices remained for the millions of Catholics in Ukraine, Lithuania, and other territories incorporated into the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, western Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union. It was at that time that the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church in Galicia, with about three and a half million members, was declared illegal, its bishops and 1,600 priests sent to Siberian labour camps, and its parish churches and properties handed over to the Orthodox Church. The Greco-Catholics of Ruthenia met a similar fate. In 1947 their bishop, Theodore Romzha, was severely beaten on several occasions and was the victim of a botched assassination attempt by the secret police, in the form of an automobile accident in which he did not die. While he was recovering in hospital, someone somehow poisoned him with cyanide. Of his priests, sixty-one were killed and 150 were sent to Siberia. Romzha and several of his companions were beatified by Pope John Paul II in June 2001 during his pastoral visit to Ukraine.

The history of the Byzantine Catholic Church in the former U.S.S.R. is the story of a martyrdom and a continuous campaign of persecution. By 1952 it had resulted in the death or deportation of twenty-seven bishops, the arrest or execution of over 7,000 priests, the destruction of 8,000 churches, the closure of 3,000 convents, seminaries and academies, the deportation of at least five million Catholics to Siberia and Central Asia, the closure of Catholic hospitals, parish schools and charities, and the suppression of the Catholic press. All of this was virtually unnoticed in the West.

The persecution of the Catholic churches lasted until December 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev re-established diplomatic relations with the Vatican. In the last fifteen years, Eastern Catholics emerged from underground with full force although tensions persist. The Russian Orthodox Church still opposes a visit to Russia by the Pope and ugly battles still rage with Orthodox Christians, especially over reclaiming Catholic church properties that the Orthodox whisked away so many years ago. Terribly hard feelings still live among these people. Healing of memories is needed after so much suffering, blood, and death.

Byzantine Catholic Immigrants in Roman Catholic America

The reception of Eastern Catholics into the U.S. and Canada one hundred years ago was not a pleasant one. Byzantine rites and customs, in particular the practice of a married clergy, presented a serious problem for the established American Catholic world dominated largely by the Irish. The first blow from the Latin church was a strategic diminutio capitis, literally a cutting off of the head. Disable the leadership and you weaken the people. On 1 October 1890, the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, in a letter addressed to James, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, ordered all married Byzantine Catholic priests to return to Europe immediately. It further stated that only celibate priests should be sent in the future to America. It is clear that the Sacred Congregation was unfamiliar with the terms of the Unions of Brest (1595) and Uzhorod (1646). Likewise, it is also clear that the Romans involved in these Unions four centuries ago could not anticipate this massive emigration to America and the consequent collision of cultures. The valid traditions of Eastern churches preserved by these Unions and endorsed by the Latin church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been forgotten by the turn of the twentieth century.