Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church: The Complete History — From the Carpathian Mountains to the Metropolia of Pittsburgh
The Complete Guide
Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church: The Complete History — From the Carpathian Mountains to the Metropolia of Pittsburgh
The story of the mountain people who brought Byzantine Christianity across the Atlantic in coal-stained hands — and what Rome did next that almost destroyed them
In the coal towns of western Pennsylvania, in the steel mill suburbs of Pittsburgh, in the mining camps of Ohio and West Virginia, there are churches with onion domes and iconostases that look as if they were transplanted directly from the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe — because, in a very real sense, they were. The Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church in America is the faith that the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants brought with them from the mountain villages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1880s and 1890s, a faith so deeply embedded in their identity that it survived the crossing, the coal mines, the hostility of American Catholic bishops, two disastrous papal decrees that drove tens of thousands of their members into Orthodoxy, and the slow attrition of Americanization — and emerged, still Byzantine, still recognizably itself, as the only self-governing Eastern Catholic metropolitan church in the United States.
The story of the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church in America is one of the most dramatic in the entire history of Eastern Christianity in the New World. It involves a widowed priest whose encounter with an Irish-American archbishop in 1889 triggered the largest mass conversion from Catholicism to Orthodoxy in American history. It involves papal decrees that banned the married clergy the church had maintained since 1646, producing a schism that sent thirty-seven parishes and tens of thousands of faithful to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. It involves a bishop who gave the church its modern name — "Byzantine Catholic" — and a pope who elevated it to the only Eastern Catholic metropolitanate in the Western Hemisphere.
Understanding this church means understanding the Rusyns: who they were, where they came from, what they carried across the Atlantic, and why they were so vulnerable to the institutional pressures that tried, repeatedly, to absorb them into the Latin Catholic mainstream.
The Rusyns: A People of the Carpathian Mountains
The Rusyns — also called Ruthenians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Carpatho-Russians, or Uhro-Rusyns — are an East Slavic people who inhabited the Carpathian Mountain region straddling the borders of what are now Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. They are distinct from Ukrainians (though related), distinct from Russians (though sharing linguistic and cultural elements), and distinct from the Slovak and Hungarian populations among whom they lived for centuries under Habsburg rule. Their identity is complex, contested, and in many ways defined precisely by their distinctiveness from each of the larger groups that surround them.
The Rusyns received Christianity in its Byzantine form from the Kyivan-Byzantine sphere in the 9th through 12th centuries — the same missionary movement that baptized the Slavic peoples of the Balkans and the Kievan Rus. They were evangelized through the tradition that Saints Cyril and Methodius had established: a Byzantine Christianity that used Slavonic as its liturgical language, employed the Eastern rites and calendar, and maintained the theological formation of the Constantinople school. Their Christianity was Byzantine, but it was Slavic in expression — Church Slavonic rather than Greek was the language of their worship, and the traditions of the Kyivan church rather than the Greek or Serbian church were their immediate heritage.
By the 17th century, the Rusyns of Transcarpathia — the region that is now western Ukraine, then the northeastern corner of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Habsburg Empire — were overwhelmingly Orthodox Christians. They were a people of subsistence agriculture in mountain villages, of extreme poverty by Habsburg standards, of limited education and political power, but of deep religious identity. Their Orthodox faith was not merely a confessional category; it was woven into the fabric of their daily life, their calendar, their music, their art, and their sense of community in a way that would prove extraordinarily resistant to the various institutional pressures that would later try to alter it.
The Union of Uzhhorod (1646): Sixty-Three Priests Enter Rome
On April 24, 1646, in the castle chapel at Uzhhorod (Hungarian: Ungvár), sixty-three Orthodox priests of the Transcarpathian region formally entered into union with the Catholic Church. The event is known as the Union of Uzhhorod, and it is the founding moment of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church.
The union was brokered by the Jesuit-influenced Catholic Bishop of Eger, who administered the region on behalf of the Habsburg crown. The motivations on both sides were mixed. For the Habsburgs and the Catholic hierarchy, the union represented the extension of Catholic influence into the Orthodox communities of Transcarpathia, consistent with the broader Counter-Reformation project. For the Rusyn clergy, the union offered the prospect of equal legal status with Catholic clergy under Habsburg law — specifically, exemption from serfdom and the educational opportunities available to recognized Catholic priests.
The terms were explicit and carefully negotiated. The sixty-three priests accepted the four points of doctrinal agreement that the Union of Brest had established for Ukrainian Greek Catholics in 1596: papal primacy, the Filioque, purgatory, and unleavened bread in the Eucharist. In exchange, they retained everything else: the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in Church Slavonic, the Eastern calendar, the iconostasis and Byzantine vestments, Eastern monastic and canonical traditions, and — crucially — the right to ordain married men to the priesthood. This last provision was not a marginal concession. It was the fundamental Eastern canonical tradition, and the explicit preservation of married clergy in the terms of the 1646 union would become the source of the most dramatic conflict in the church's American history two and a half centuries later.
The Vatican confirmed and ratified the union by 1655, and its extension to all Rusyns of the region was completed by 1721. The union was not without subsequent controversy — not all Orthodox priests and communities accepted it, and there were periods of resistance and reversal — but by the early 18th century the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church was the dominant religious institution of the Transcarpathian Rusyns.
The sixty-three priests who signed the Union of Uzhhorod kept everything that mattered for Byzantine identity: the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom in Church Slavonic, the Eastern calendar, the iconostasis and Byzantine vestments, the Eastern sacramental theology, and — most significantly for the American story — the explicit right to ordain married men to the priesthood. This right, enshrined in the founding document of the church's union with Rome, was precisely what two papal decrees in the early 20th century would attempt to strip away from the American community — triggering the largest Catholic-to-Orthodox conversions in American history.
The Habsburg Era: Growth and the Eparchy of Mukachevo
Under Habsburg rule, the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church developed the canonical structures that would give it institutional permanence. The most important step was the creation of the Eparchy of Mukachevo in 1771, when Pope Clement XIV issued the bull Eximiae religioni principi formally establishing a Greek Catholic diocese for the Transcarpathian Rusyns with its seat at Uzhhorod (the bishop's city, rather than the smaller town of Mukachevo that gave the eparchy its historical name).
The Eparchy of Mukachevo was the mother church of the entire Ruthenian Catholic tradition. Its bishops were the principal pastoral leaders of the Rusyn people in the 18th and 19th centuries — not only in the religious sense but in the educational and cultural sense as well. The Rusyn Greek Catholic clergy, educated at the eparchy's seminary in Uzhhorod, were the principal literate class in Transcarpathian villages where most of the population could not read. They kept Rusyn language and culture alive in written form when no secular institution did so. They founded the primary schools that gave generations of Rusyn children their first education.
The 19th century saw additional eparchies created as the Ruthenian Catholic community expanded or as political boundaries created new pastoral needs. The Eparchy of Prešov-Košice was established in 1818 for the Slovak Ruthenians of eastern Slovakia, who shared the Byzantine tradition but had developed a somewhat distinct linguistic and cultural identity. The Eparchy of Hajdúdorog was created in 1912 for the Ruthenians who had been substantially Magyarized and now worshiped in Hungarian — an institution we have examined in its own right as the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church.
By the late 19th century, the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church was a well-established institution with multiple eparchies, a seminary tradition, a Byzantine liturgical heritage intact, and a community of approximately one to two million faithful spread across Transcarpathia, Slovakia, and adjacent regions. It was also a community under severe economic pressure — the poverty of the Carpathian mountain villages was acute, land was scarce, taxes were heavy, and the growing industrial economy of Western Europe and North America offered an escape that increasingly attractive. The great emigration was about to begin.
Byzantine Icons for Prayer
The Icons the Rusyns Brought from the Carpathian Mountains
Father Ivan Wolansky: The First Greek Catholic Priest in America (1884)
The Ruthenian Catholic immigration to the United States began in the late 1870s and intensified through the 1880s. By 1884 the community in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania — one of the coal-mining towns of the anthracite region — had grown large enough that the immigrants petitioned the Metropolitan of Lemberg (the Archbishop who had oversight of Greek Catholic affairs in the region) for a priest of their own rite. The Metropolitan sent Father Ivan Wolansky, a priest from the Diocese of Lemberg in Galicia, who arrived in the United States in December 1884.
Father Wolansky was the first Greek Catholic priest to take up work among the Rusyn immigrants in America. He presented himself in Philadelphia with his letters of authorization, but immediately encountered the structural problem that would define the Greek Catholic experience in America for the next four decades: he was a married priest, and the American Catholic bishops had no framework for a married Catholic clergyman. He experienced difficulty in being recognized as a priest in good standing by the local Latin hierarchy.
Despite this obstacle, Wolansky proceeded to organize the first Greek Catholic parish in the United States at Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, in 1885, dedicating the first Ruthenian Catholic church building there in 1886. He then embarked on a remarkable missionary circuit: organizing parish communities in Kingston (1887), Hazleton (1887), Olyphant (1888), Shamokin (1890), Mount Carmel (1891), Pittsburgh (1891), and Philadelphia (1893). By the time the full institutional crisis became apparent in the 1890s, there were already dozens of Rusyn communities scattered across the Pennsylvania coal country, served by priests who were married, who celebrated a liturgy in Church Slavonic rather than Latin, and who were canonically in a gray zone that the American Latin hierarchy found deeply unsatisfying.
Father Alexis Toth and Archbishop John Ireland: The Confrontation That Changed American Catholicism
The single most consequential event in the early history of the Ruthenian Catholic Church in America was a meeting that lasted less than an hour in the winter of 1889, between a widowed Rusyn priest and an Irish-American archbishop who did not know what to make of him. The results of that meeting eventually sent more than 20,000 Eastern Catholics into Orthodoxy and indirectly built the Orthodox Church in America.
Father Alexis Toth (Aleksei Georgievich Tovt) arrived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 15, 1889, called there by a petition from the Ruthenian Catholic community at St. Mary's Greek Catholic Church. He was a man of considerable education — a graduate of Charles University in Prague, former professor and director at the Greek Catholic seminary of Prešov — and a widower (his wife and child had died years earlier). As an Eastern Catholic priest arriving in a diocese, he observed the canonical courtesy of presenting himself to the local bishop: John Ireland, Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.
The meeting was a disaster. Archbishop Ireland — who was at the forefront of the "Americanization" movement in the Catholic Church, deeply hostile to ethnic parishes and to anything that smacked of Eastern distinctiveness — told Toth directly that he did not consider Toth or his bishop (the Greek Catholic Bishop of Prešov) to be genuinely Catholic. Ireland refused to grant Toth faculties to minister in the Archdiocese. He furthermore ordered his own priests and parishes not to associate with Toth or his parishioners.
Toth sent letters to his bishop in Hungary detailing what had happened and requesting instructions. He reportedly never received a reply. Finding himself without recognition, without faculties, and effectively isolated from the Catholic institutional structure that was supposed to support him, Toth concluded that the American Catholic hierarchy viewed Greek Catholic priests as unwanted immigrants to be absorbed into the Latin mainstream rather than as Eastern Catholic clergy with legitimate rights and traditions.
His response was to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, together with his entire Minneapolis parish. The conversion took place in 1890, and it was the beginning of a movement that would have staggering consequences. Toth became a vigorous missionary for Orthodoxy among the Rusyn and broader Slavic immigrant communities. By the time of his death on May 7, 1909, he had personally brought approximately 20,000 Eastern Catholics into the Orthodox Church — a number that continued to grow in the years following his death, as the conditions that had driven him from Catholicism continued unchanged. The Orthodox Church in America canonized Toth as a saint in 1994, venerating him as the "Father of Orthodoxy in America."
Father Ivan Wolansky
Arrived from Galicia December 1884; organized Shenandoah PA parish 1885, first church building 1886; established parishes across Pennsylvania coal country 1887–1893. Immediately faced the married-priest problem with Latin bishops. His arrival began the institutional challenge that would define American Greek Catholic life for the next four decades.
Father Alexis Toth
Widowed Rusyn priest. Arrived Minneapolis November 1889. Archbishop John Ireland refused to recognize him as Catholic. Converted his Minneapolis parish to Orthodoxy 1890. By his death in 1909 had led ~20,000 Eastern Catholics to Orthodoxy. Canonized by the Orthodox Church in America 1994 as "Father of Orthodoxy in America." The most consequential single figure in early American Eastern Catholic history.
The Great Wave: 300,000 Faithful and No Bishop
Despite the losses to Orthodoxy that began with the Toth conversion, the Ruthenian Catholic immigration continued and accelerated through the 1890s and into the early 20th century. The push factors in the Carpathian region — poverty, limited land, political instability under the shifting Habsburg policies — intensified. The pull factors in America — industrial work, higher wages, the chain migration networks that drew families to communities where they already had relatives — were powerful. By 1894 there were 30 parishes serving what was estimated to be 100,000 or more Ruthenian faithful in the United States. By the early 1900s, estimates suggest the community had grown to perhaps 300,000.
All of this community existed without a bishop of their own rite. Every Eastern Catholic priest in America was technically under the jurisdiction of the local Latin bishop, who generally had no knowledge of the Byzantine tradition, no sympathy for married clergy, and no institutional framework for congregations that worshiped in Church Slavonic and maintained Eastern sacramental practices. The Latin bishops actively discouraged the establishment of Greek Catholic parishes, preferring that Ruthenian immigrants attend existing Latin-rite Polish, Slovak, or Hungarian parishes. They refused to recognize the canonical authority of married Greek Catholic priests in many cases. And they pushed aggressively — sometimes coercively — for Greek Catholic immigrants to transfer to the Latin Rite.
The Alexis Toth situation had dramatized this problem but had not resolved it. The communities that remained Catholic survived on the energy of their immigrant clergy (mostly married men sent from Europe) and the determination of their laypeople, who built churches, organized fraternal societies, and in many cases legally incorporated their parishes to protect their property from seizure by Latin bishops who claimed canonical ownership. The Greek Catholic Union of the USA, founded in 1892, was the largest of the fraternal organizations that provided both mutual aid insurance and a collective institutional voice for the immigrant community.
Bishop Soter Ortynsky (1907): The First Eastern Bishop in America
The crisis of the leaderless Eastern Catholic community — dramatized by the ongoing losses to Orthodoxy — finally produced a papal response in 1907. Pope Pius X appointed Father Soter Stephen Ortynsky, a Ukrainian Basilian monk, as bishop for all Slavic Eastern Catholics of the Byzantine Rite in America. He was the first Eastern Catholic bishop to serve in the United States.
Ortynsky's appointment was a significant step, but it was immediately undermined by the canonical arrangement that governed his role. Rather than being appointed as an independent bishop with full episcopal authority over his Eastern Catholic faithful, Ortynsky was made a suffragan bishop subject to the Latin bishops in whose dioceses his faithful lived. He required their approval for virtually every episcopal act. He was, in canonical reality, more of a vicar than a bishop — a Roman solution to an Eastern problem that satisfied no one in the Eastern Catholic community.
Ortynsky himself recognized this and responded by publicly refusing to comply with the canonical restrictions. He wrote an open letter declaring: "I did not and do not obey this bull, because it is against the dignity of our Church." Despite the difficulties and the canonical constraints, he worked tirelessly for the development of his church — building parishes, inviting the Basilian Sisters to the United States, opening an orphanage, establishing evening schools, and founding the Providence Association of Ukrainian Catholics of America.
Ortynsky died in 1916 having served for nine years in impossible circumstances. After his death, Rome split the Eastern Catholic community into two separate administrations: Father Petro Poniatyshyn for the Galician (Ukrainian) Greek Catholics, and Father Gabriel Martyak for the Transcarpathian (Ruthenian) Catholics. This administrative separation formalized the ethnic and cultural distinction between Ukrainians and Rusyns that had always existed in the community and that had been a source of tension throughout Ortynsky's tenure.
Ea Semper (1907): How Rome Made the First Bishop Powerless
The same year that Bishop Ortynsky was appointed — 1907 — Pope Pius X issued an apostolic letter called Ea Semper that severely curtailed the rights of the Greek Catholic Church in America. The decree was the result of sustained lobbying by American Latin bishops who were alarmed by the presence of married Catholic priests in their dioceses and who viewed the Eastern Catholic tradition as an obstacle to the uniformity they wished to impose on American Catholic life.
Ea Semper reaffirmed the requirement of clerical celibacy for Eastern Catholic clergy in the United States, explicitly prohibiting the ordination of married men to the priesthood in America and requiring that married priests already serving in America be removed. It also confirmed Ortynsky's status as a bishop subject to local Latin bishops rather than an independent ordinary — effectively making him a vicar general of the Latin hierarchy rather than a genuine Eastern Catholic bishop in his own right.
The decree enraged the Greek Catholic community. They had come to America on the explicit understanding that their Byzantine tradition — including married clergy — was protected by the Union of Uzhhorod and recognized by Rome. They had built their parishes, organized their communities, and maintained their Eastern identity against sustained Latin pressure on the strength of that assurance. Ea Semper felt like a betrayal — a capitulation by Rome to the American Latin bishops at the expense of the Eastern Catholics who had been Rome's nominal partners since 1646.
The decree's enforcement was uneven. The married priests already in America could not simply be expelled, and the communities they served had no interest in replacing them with celibate priests from Latin seminaries. But the principle had been established, and the damage to trust was severe. Between Ea Semper in 1907 and the even harsher Cum Data Fuerit in 1929, the Greek Catholic community would lose an estimated 163 parishes and 100,000 faithful to Orthodoxy.
Bishop Basil Takach and the First Exarchate (1924)
On May 8, 1924, Pope Pius XI formally established the Apostolic Exarchate of the United States of America, Faithful of the Oriental Rite (Ruthenian) — the first dedicated canonical structure for the Ruthenian Catholics of America, separate from and not subordinate to the Latin dioceses that had controlled their lives for four decades. The first exarch was Bishop Basil Takach, a Rusyn priest from Máramaros County in Hungary who had served as spiritual director of the Mukachevo Eparchy's seminary and was ordained bishop in Rome on his way to America.
Takach is considered the first bishop of the Ruthenian Catholics in America in the full sense — the first to have genuine episcopal authority over a Ruthenian-specific canonical structure rather than being a suffragan subordinate to Latin bishops. His appointment was the official founding of what would eventually become the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh.
The exarchate Takach inherited was substantial. The first church census revealed approximately 300,000 Greek Catholic faithful organized into 155 parishes and mission churches served by 129 priests — overwhelmingly married — across thirteen deaneries stretching from New York City to Chicago. He chose the parish of St. John the Baptist in Munhall, Pennsylvania — a steel town suburb of Pittsburgh — as his cathedral, drawn by the proximity to the Greek Catholic Union of the USA and the practical realities of serving a community concentrated in the Pittsburgh steel and Pennsylvania coal regions.
Takach won immediate approval from his community by continuing to ordain married men to the priesthood. The exarchate was growing, the parishes were active, and for a brief moment it seemed that the Greek Catholic Church in America had found stable footing. Then, in 1929, Rome struck again.
Cum Data Fuerit (1929): The Celibacy Decree That Split the Church
On March 1, 1929, Pope Pius XI issued the decree Cum Data Fuerit, which reiterated Rome's position that Eastern Catholic clergy in America must be celibate — prohibiting the ordination of married men to the priesthood and requiring existing married priests in the United States to leave or be removed from their posts. The decree was renewed for a further ten years in 1939.
Cum Data Fuerit was the most damaging single document in the history of the Ruthenian Catholic Church in America. It came five years after the establishment of the exarchate, at a moment when the community had been building stability and confidence under Bishop Takach's leadership. The bishop opposed it — he appealed repeatedly to Rome, arguing that the decree violated the terms of the 1646 Union of Uzhhorod and the canonical rights of the Eastern Catholic churches — but his appeals were rebuffed. Rome's position was clear: the American Latin bishops wanted celibate clergy, and the Eastern Catholics in America would conform.
Takach ultimately concluded that he had no choice but to comply. His compliance made him, in the eyes of a significant segment of his community, a collaborator in the destruction of their tradition. The decree became the rallying point for all the frustrations of four decades of institutional subordination to the Latin hierarchy — Ea Semper, the episcopal celibacy requirement, the property disputes, the demands for Latinization — and it produced the most serious schism in the church's American history.
Father Chornock and the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese
The organized resistance to Cum Data Fuerit crystallized around Father Orestes Chornock, a widowed priest serving in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who became the most visible leader of the opposition to Bishop Takach's compliance with the celibacy decree. In July 1935, thirty-seven parishes in opposition to the Latinization efforts petitioned for a Church Congress to decide their future. A Diocesan Council — the Sobor — was held in Pittsburgh on November 23, 1937, at which the clergy and delegates voted to formally break with Rome.
The Sobor elected Father Chornock as bishop of the new body and petitioned the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople for reception into Orthodoxy as a distinct eparchy. The Ecumenical Patriarch granted the request, placing the new body under the spiritual care of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America. The result was the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese — also known as ACROD — which continues to exist today, headquartered in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, with over 110,000 members.
Chornock and five other clergy were excommunicated by the Vatican. By 1938, thirty-seven Ruthenian parishes had formally transferred to the new Orthodox jurisdiction. The schism was a human catastrophe for the Byzantine Catholic community — families divided, parishes disrupted, decades of community building shattered — and a direct consequence of Rome's decision to impose Latin canonical discipline on an Eastern church without regard for the terms under which that church had entered union with Rome in 1646.
The story has a partial sequel. Some of those who had left — including Father Andrew Zapotocky, a priest of the new ACROD diocese — eventually returned to the Byzantine Catholic Church. Father Andrew's reception back was facilitated in 1965, and his son Adrian had preceded him. These returns did not erase the schism, but they testify to the complex loyalties that the 1929 decree had fractured.
Bishop Nicholas Elko and the Name "Byzantine Catholic"
In the 1950s, the Ruthenian Catholic Church in America began the process of institutional recovery and cultural redefinition that would culminate in the 1969 Metropolitan Church. The central figure of this period was Bishop Nicholas Elko, who served as Exarch of Pittsburgh from 1955 and became the first Eparch (bishop) of Pittsburgh after the 1963 division of the exarchate. Elko was the first American-born bishop of the Ruthenian Catholic Church — a symbolic milestone in the community's Americanization — and he made one contribution that permanently changed the church's public identity.
Elko recognized that the term "Greek Catholic" was causing persistent confusion among American Catholics. The word "Greek" in "Greek Catholic" refers to the Byzantine-Greek liturgical tradition, not to Greek ethnicity. But Americans consistently assumed that "Greek Catholic" meant something connected to Greece or to Greek ethnicity — creating confusion with the Greek Orthodox Church, and making it harder for the community to explain its identity to its neighbors, employers, and the broader American public.
Elko began systematically replacing "Greek Catholic" with "Byzantine Catholic" — stressing that the church was of the Byzantine Rite, not of Greek nationality. The clarification was immediately practical and immediately effective. In 1956, the U.S. jurisdiction officially stopped using "Ruthenian Greek Catholic" to describe itself, and since 1969 has called itself the Byzantine Catholic Church. The term "Byzantine Catholic" is now the standard American designation for all the Eastern Catholic churches of the Byzantine Rite, and the Ruthenian church's adoption of it in the 1950s–1960s was the decisive moment in the terminology's spread.
Elko also founded the Byzantine Catholic World newspaper in 1956, giving the community its first dedicated English-language publication, and oversaw the opening of the Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Pittsburgh in 1951 — the primary clergy formation institution for the Ruthenian Church in America, which has educated the majority of the church's American-born priests ever since.
The Metropolia: From Exarchate to Metropolitan Church (1963–1969)
The growth and institutional maturation of the Ruthenian Catholic Church in America through the 1950s and early 1960s produced the conditions for its most significant canonical elevation. In 1963, Pope Paul VI divided the Apostolic Exarchate of Pittsburgh into two jurisdictions, upgrading both to eparchies: the Eparchy of Pittsburgh (with Bishop Nicholas Elko as first eparch) and the new Eparchy of Passaic, New Jersey (with Bishop Stephen Kocisko as first eparch, Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel).
The division reflected the geographic reality of the American Ruthenian community: heavily concentrated in western Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh area, but with a substantial eastern seaboard population centered in New Jersey that warranted its own institutional structure. The Eparchy of Passaic was designed to serve the East Coast Ruthenian communities from Maine to Florida.
Six years later, on February 21, 1969, Pope Paul VI issued the decree Quando Quidem Christus creating the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church — a full Metropolitan Church sui iuris, the highest canonical form of self-governance available to an Eastern Catholic community in the United States. The Eparchy of Pittsburgh was elevated to the Archeparchy of Pittsburgh, becoming the metropolitan see. At the same moment, a new third eparchy was created: the Eparchy of Parma, Ohio, with its cathedral at St. John the Baptist in Parma, to serve the Midwest Ruthenian communities. Archbishop Stephen Kocisko (transferred from Passaic) became the first Metropolitan of the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh.
The 1969 elevation made the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh the only self-governing Eastern Catholic metropolitan church in the United States — a distinction it still holds today. A fourth eparchy, originally named Van Nuys and later renamed Phoenix, was added by Pope John Paul II in 1982 to serve the western American communities, completing the four-eparchy structure that currently governs the American church.
| Jurisdiction | Established | Cathedral City | Cathedral |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archeparchy of Pittsburgh (Metropolitan See) | 1924 (exarchate); 1969 (archeparchy) | Munhall / Pittsburgh, PA | Cathedral of St. John the Baptist |
| Eparchy of Passaic, NJ | 1963 | Passaic, NJ | Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel |
| Eparchy of Parma, OH | 1969 | Parma, OH | Cathedral of St. John the Baptist |
| Eparchy of Phoenix, AZ | 1982 (as Van Nuys); renamed Phoenix 2010 | Phoenix, AZ | Cathedral of St. Stephen |
The Liturgy: Byzantine Rite in Church Slavonic and English
The Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church celebrates the Byzantine Divine Liturgy — in Church Slavonic (historically) and English (today, primarily in American parishes). This combination reflects the church's double heritage: its origins in the Carpathian Mountain villages where Church Slavonic was the sacred language, and its transformation into an American church whose predominantly English-speaking membership has increasingly needed the liturgy in the language of their daily lives.
The transition from Church Slavonic to English was the major liturgical event of the 20th-century American church. It was gradual, contested in some quarters, but ultimately inevitable: by the second and third generation, American-born Ruthenians were not Church Slavonic speakers, and a liturgy in an incomprehensible language could not sustain their participation. After the Second Vatican Council, the shift to English accelerated. Today most American Byzantine Catholic parishes celebrate primarily in English, with Church Slavonic retained for certain feasts, chants, and in parishes with strong traditionalist communities. The Ss. Cyril and Methodius Seminary in Pittsburgh produced English translations of the Byzantine liturgical texts that have become the standard in the American church.
The Byzantine Rite itself remains fully intact: the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, the iconostasis, Byzantine vestments and chant, the Eastern sacramental theology (including the tradition of baptism, chrismation, and first Eucharist administered together to infants), and the Julian calendar for feast days. Post-Vatican II "de-Latinization" removed certain Latin practices that had crept into Ruthenian worship over the centuries of close proximity to the Latin Catholic world — pipe organs, certain vestment styles, devotional practices imported from the Latin tradition — and restored specifically Byzantine practices that had fallen into disuse.
| Feature | Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Practice |
|---|---|
| Liturgical Languages | English (primary in US); Church Slavonic (traditional; used for feasts and by traditionalist communities); Rusyn and Slovak (in European jurisdictions) |
| Divine Liturgy | Saint John Chrysostom (standard); Saint Basil (great feasts & Lent); Pre-Sanctified Gifts (Lent weekdays) |
| Calendar | Julian calendar for feast days (Christmas Jan. 7, Theophany Jan. 19, etc.) |
| Clergy | Married men may be ordained priests (restored in US after decades of controversy); bishops celibate |
| Initiation | Baptism, Chrismation, and first Eucharist administered together — including to infants |
| Canonical Status | Metropolitan Church sui iuris (self-governing); only Eastern Catholic metropolitanate in the US |
| Current Metropolitan | Archbishop William C. Skurla (since 2012), Archeparchy of Pittsburgh |
| US Faithful | ~100,000 (est.); ~417,800 worldwide (Annuario Pontificio 2017) |
| US Parishes | ~650 parishes and missions worldwide; several hundred in the US |
The Married Priesthood: A Tradition Fought For and Restored
The right to ordain married men to the priesthood — the right explicitly guaranteed by the Union of Uzhhorod in 1646, stripped by papal decree in 1929, and the cause of the largest schism in American Byzantine Catholic history — was eventually restored to the American church, though the process took decades and the restoration was never as complete or as uncontested as the original right had been.
After the Second Vatican Council, the theological climate changed significantly. The decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum (1964), which addressed the Eastern Catholic churches, reaffirmed in principle the right of Eastern churches to maintain their own canonical traditions — including married clergy. This created the theological foundation for challenging the restrictions imposed by Cum Data Fuerit.
In the years following Vatican II, the American Byzantine Catholic Church gradually resumed the ordination of married men. The process was not a formal papal revocation of Cum Data Fuerit but a de facto normalization through the tacit acceptance of individual ordinations. By the late 20th century, married priests were once again serving in Byzantine Catholic parishes across America — not in the numbers that had existed before 1929, since celibate priests trained at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius Seminary made up the core of the clergy, but in sufficient numbers to demonstrate that the 1929 ban was no longer operative in practice.
Today the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh maintains married priests in its parishes as part of normal canonical practice. More than half of the church's priests in Europe are married; in the United States the proportion is lower but significant. The tradition that sixty-three Rusyn priests carried into the 1646 union, that American bishops tried to extinguish through Ea Semper and Cum Data Fuerit, and that the Chornock schism was partly fought to preserve — that tradition is alive, restored, and recognized as the authentic Byzantine heritage of the church.
Icons for Prayer and Home
The Byzantine Tradition the Ruthenian Church Has Carried Since 1646
The Four American Eparchies Today
The Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh today consists of four eparchies covering the entire United States, led by Metropolitan Archbishop William C. Skurla (since 2012) from the Archeparchy of Pittsburgh. Each eparchy reflects a distinct geographic dimension of the American Ruthenian community's settlement history.
Archeparchy of Pittsburgh — The Metropolitan See
The Archeparchy of Pittsburgh is the mother church, the metropolitan see, and the institutional heart of the American Byzantine Catholic community. Its cathedral, St. John the Baptist, in Munhall, Pennsylvania — the steel-town suburb that Bishop Takach chose as his seat in the 1920s — remains the principal church of the entire metropolitanate. The Archeparchy is concentrated in western Pennsylvania and adjacent West Virginia and Ohio, in the old steel and coal country where the original Rusyn immigrants settled. The Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Pittsburgh is the primary clergy formation institution for the entire American church, and the Heritage Institute (founded 1971 by Bishop Michael Dudick) houses a significant collection of Ruthenian icons, manuscripts, and cultural objects.
Eparchy of Passaic — The East Coast
The Eparchy of Passaic, New Jersey, covers the entire eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida. Its cathedral is the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel in Passaic, New Jersey — a city with one of the highest concentrations of Byzantine Catholics on the East Coast. The Eparchy has historically served the large Ruthenian communities in northeastern New Jersey (Passaic, Clifton, Bayonne) and extends south through metropolitan New York and down through New England. Bishop Basil Losten (1983–2007) was one of the most significant figures of the modern Passaic Eparchy, known for his work on Rusyn cultural heritage and ecumenical relations.
Eparchy of Parma — The Midwest
The Eparchy of Parma, Ohio, covers the Midwest and serves the Byzantine Catholic communities of northeastern Ohio (the Cleveland and Parma areas with their strong Rusyn immigrant heritage), Michigan, Indiana, and the broader Midwest. Its cathedral is St. John the Baptist in Parma — the Parma area having developed one of the most concentrated Byzantine Catholic communities outside Pennsylvania. The first Eparch, Bishop Emil Mihalik, expanded the Parma Eparchy's presence into the western edges of its territory — Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Denver — which eventually became the basis for the fourth eparchy.
Eparchy of Phoenix — The West
The Eparchy of Phoenix was created by Pope John Paul II in 1982 as the Eparchy of Van Nuys, California, to serve the growing Byzantine Catholic communities of the American West. Renamed Phoenix in 2010, its cathedral is the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Phoenix, Arizona. The western eparchy serves communities across California, Arizona, Nevada, the Pacific Northwest, and other western states — a reflection of the broader movement of American Byzantine Catholics away from the original immigrant concentrations in the industrial northeast and toward the sunbelt and western cities that have defined American demographic growth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The Ruthenian Church in Europe: Mukachevo, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic
The Ruthenian Greek Catholic tradition does not exist only in America. The original heartland — the Eparchy of Mukachevo in Transcarpathian Ukraine — survived the Soviet era in a state of suppression similar to what the Romanian and Slovak Greek Catholic churches experienced, and was revived after 1989. The modern Eparchy of Mukachevo, with its seat at Uzhhorod, is directly subject to the Holy See (not subordinate to the Pittsburgh Metropolitan) and serves the Ukrainian Rusyn community in Transcarpathia. It is the oldest continuous Greek Catholic structure in the tradition, tracing its lineage directly to the 1771 papal bull.
In Slovakia, Ruthenian Greek Catholics form a significant minority in the eastern Prešov region. The Eparchy of Prešov — established in 1818 for the Slovak Ruthenians — eventually was divided in 2008 into two eparchies: the Eparchy of Prešov and the Eparchy of Košice. An Apostolic Exarchate for Ruthenian Catholics in the Czech Republic was established in Prague in 1996, serving communities that included both post-Communist immigrants and descendants of earlier Ruthenian settlements.
In 2022, a new Apostolic Exarchate of Saints Cyril and Methodius was erected in Toronto to serve Slovak Greek Catholics in Canada — an acknowledgment of the significant Canadian Byzantine Catholic community that had been without its own canonical structure. These European and Canadian jurisdictions are connected to the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Church through their shared Byzantine Rite heritage and their historical origins in the same Carpathian Mountain tradition, though each operates under its own canonical arrangements with the Holy See.
The Church Today
The Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh today counts approximately 100,000 faithful in the United States, in approximately 200 parishes across the four eparchies, with additional communities served by missions and visiting clergy. Worldwide, Ruthenian Catholics number approximately 417,000–420,000, including the European jurisdictions in Ukraine, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
The American church faces the demographic challenges that confront all communities whose peak growth was driven by immigration waves that ended a century ago: an aging membership, the closure or consolidation of smaller parishes, a declining supply of priests, and the challenge of maintaining an Eastern Catholic identity in a country where "Catholic" overwhelmingly means Latin Catholic and where the Byzantine distinctiveness that was so hard-won through the Alexis Toth era and the Cum Data Fuerit crisis is not well understood by the broader culture.
Against these challenges, the church has genuine assets. The Ss. Cyril and Methodius Seminary continues to produce American-born priests with a deep formation in Byzantine theology and liturgy. The Byzantine Catholic World and a growing online presence connect communities across the four eparchies. Rusyn heritage organizations and cultural festivals maintain connections to the Carpathian roots that produced the tradition. The Getty Heritage Institute's collection and the various parish museums and archives preserve the material culture of the American Ruthenian community. And the ongoing restoration of the married priesthood — the tradition the church fought for so long and at such cost — is slowly rebuilding the pastoral capacity that the 1929 decree had damaged.
The onion-domed churches of western Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and northeastern Ohio — built by coal miners and steel workers in the early 20th century — are still standing. The iconostases inside them still display the icons that Eastern Christianity has used to mediate encounter with the holy for fifteen centuries. The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, now in English rather than Church Slavonic, is still being sung. The sixty-three Rusyn priests who signed their names at Uzhhorod in 1646 chose a tradition that has proved extraordinarily durable.
Free Eastern Christian Marriage Books — The Byzantine Theology of the Domestic Church
The Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church fought for decades — at the cost of tens of thousands of faithful lost to schism — to maintain the Eastern tradition of married priests who lead their families as domestic churches. That same Byzantine understanding of marriage as a holy sacrament of mutual sanctification runs through all Eastern Christian spirituality. Our free marriage books draw on that tradition, completely free with no email required.
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The Mountain People and the Onion Domes They Built
Sixty-three priests in a castle chapel in 1646. A widowed man and an Irish archbishop in an 1889 office. A Bridgeport pastor who would not bend. A Pittsburgh bishop who gave the church a new name. The Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic story is the story of people who carried an ancient faith across an ocean and fought for it on foreign ground — and who built, in the coal country and the steel towns of America, a Byzantine Christian presence that is still alive, still Eastern, still itself.
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