Eastern Catholic Churches

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eastern Catholic Churches are 23 distinct Christian communities, all in full communion with the pope in Rome, yet shaped by traditions that stretch back centuries before Rome became the center of Western Christianity. Of the 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide, roughly 18 million belong to these Eastern churches. They are a minority within a vast institution, yet they represent five ancient liturgical traditions and span continents from South India to Eastern Africa to Eastern Europe. Who are these churches? How did they come to exist alongside the Latin Church? And what does it mean to be fully Catholic while celebrating the faith in ways the Western world rarely recognizes?

• 2. Five Rites, Many Churches

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  Five historic liturgical traditions shape everything about how Eastern Catholics worship: the Alexandrian Rite, the Armenian Rite, the Byzantine Rite, the East Syriac Rite, and the West Syriac Rite. Each one carries not just a set of prayers but a distinct theological, spiritual, and disciplinary heritage tied to the cultures and historical circumstances of specific peoples. The 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches defines a rite as more than ceremony. Canon 28 of that code describes a rite as the liturgical, theological, spiritual, and disciplinary patrimony of a distinct people, by which its own manner of living the faith is made visible. That definition matters because the word rite is still frequently confused with the word church. In 1999, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops clarified that contemporary canon law calls for the use of the word church, not rite, when designating these communities. A writer in a January 2006 periodical put it plainly: the Eastern Churches are still mistakenly called Eastern-Rite Churches, but are most properly called Eastern Churches or Eastern Catholic Churches. The six largest of the 23 churches account for roughly 85 percent of all Eastern Catholic membership. As of 2022, the Syro-Malabar Church, which follows the East Syriac Rite and is based in Kochi, India, holds the top position; the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church comes second.

• 3. Schisms That Made History

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  The Council of Ephesus in 431 drew the first major fault line. The Church of the East, then operating primarily under the Sassanid Empire, refused to accept that council's conclusions, and the two sides each declared the other heretical. The Church of the East later expanded across Asia before collapsing after the Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the 14th century; monuments of their presence still exist in China. The next fracture came at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Those who refused Chalcedon rejected the term Monophysite, which they saw as a slur implying a single divine nature with no real human nature. They preferred Miaphysite, meaning one nature as God existing in the person of Jesus who is both human and divine. This terminological dispute carries deep theological weight and has never been fully resolved. The East-West Schism of 1054 split the remaining Christian world along the cultural divide between the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West. Patriarch of Constantinople Michael I Cerularius and Papal Legate Humbert of Silva Candida issued mutual excommunications that year; those excommunications were not revoked until 1965. The wounds deepened in 1182 when the Massacre of the Latins occurred in Constantinople, and worsened again in 1204 when the Catholic armies of the Fourth Crusade sacked the city.

• 4. How the Churches Formed

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  The Council of Florence, which convened in 1438, became the setting where several Eastern communities chose to restore communion with Rome. The See of Rome accepted them without requiring adoption of Latin customs, preserving their liturgical, theological, spiritual, and disciplinary heritage as each community's own way of living the faith. The Maronite Church stands apart from this history. It traces its roots to the Monothelite controversy of the 7th century and re-affirmed unity with the Holy See in 1154 during the Crusades. Most historical accounts treat the Maronite Church as having never fully schismed with Rome. Most other Eastern Catholic churches came into being from the 16th century onward. The former Melkite Church once considered itself in dual communion with both Rome and Constantinople; when an exclusively Orthodox body formed in the 18th century, a remainder unified exclusively with Rome and became the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. The Armenian Apostolic Church had a long-standing minority that accepted Roman primacy; the Armenian Catholic Church was officially established in the 18th century when that minority organized. The Syro-Malabar Church and Syro-Malankara Church are the two Eastern Catholic descendants of the Church of the East in the Indian subcontinent, offering a direct link back to the fracture of 431.

• 5. Marriage, Celibacy, and Canon Law

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  Eastern Catholic Churches have historically allowed the ordination of married men as priests and deacons. Within Ukraine, 90 percent of diocesan priests in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church are married. The contrast with the Latin Church's stricter celibacy requirement has been a source of friction wherever Eastern Catholics settled in traditionally Latin territories. In 1897, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith applied rules to the United States stating that only celibate or widowed priests arriving without their children should be permitted to serve there. The 1st of March 1929 decree Cum data fuerit renewed this celibacy mandate specifically for Ruthenians, and the renewal was extended again in 1939. The dissatisfaction this created among Ruthenian Catholics in the United States gave rise to the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese. Former Eastern Catholic priest Alexis Toth left the Catholic Church following criticism from Latin authorities including John Ireland, Bishop of Saint Paul. Toth has since been canonized as an Eastern Orthodox saint, recognized for leading as many as 20,000 disaffected former Eastern Catholics to the Orthodox Church. The celibacy mandate was finally removed by a decree of June 2014. In 2014, Pope Francis approved new norms through canon 758, paragraph 3, allowing Eastern Catholic churches with married clergy to ordain married men inside traditionally Latin territories and to grant faculties to married Eastern Catholic clergy previously ordained elsewhere.

• 6. Reform, Recognition, and Rome

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  On the 30th of November 1894, Pope Leo XIII issued the apostolic constitution Orientalium dignitas. In it he insisted that the Catholic Church does not possess one rite only, but embraces all the ancient rites of Christendom, and that her unity consists not in mechanical uniformity but in variety according to one principle. He also declared still in force an earlier prohibition by Pope Benedict XIV forbidding Latin Church clergy from inducing Eastern Catholics to transfer to the Roman Rite, and extended that prohibition to cover all Eastern Catholics. The Second Vatican Council continued this trajectory. Its document Orientalium Ecclesiarum stated that each individual church or rite should retain its traditions whole and entire and adapt its way of life to different needs of time and place. The council also confirmed the ancient Eastern practice of priests administering Confirmation, expressed a wish for the restoration of the permanent diaconate where it had fallen into disuse, and affirmed the rights of Eastern patriarchs and major archbishops to govern their own churches. The 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, which took effect in 1991, was the first codified body of canon law to govern all Eastern Catholic Churches collectively, although each church also holds its own internal canons layered on top. John Paul II celebrated the Divine Liturgy in Ukraine during his pontificate, a gesture that carried weight as a public affirmation of the distinctiveness and legitimacy of the Eastern Catholic tradition.

• 7. Ecumenism and Controversy

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  In 1993, the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church submitted a document known as the Balamand Declaration. It acknowledged that the initiatives which formed Eastern Catholic churches from formerly Orthodox communities took place not without the interference of extra-ecclesial interests. The commission also stated that certain civil authorities used unacceptable means in attempting to force Eastern Catholics back into Orthodoxy. The Balamand Declaration concluded that the missionary method historically called uniatism, understood as drawing a community into union with Rome by separating it from its mother church, could no longer be accepted as a valid model of Christian unity. The 2016 Joint Declaration of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill repeated this assessment, affirming that Orthodox and Greek Catholics are in need of reconciliation and of mutually acceptable forms of co-existence, while also affirming the right of Eastern Catholic communities to exist and serve their faithful. Persecution has taken other forms. A study by Methodios Stadnik documents that the Georgian Byzantine Catholic Exarch, Father Shio, and two Georgian Catholic priests were executed by Soviet authorities in 1937, after years of captivity in Solovki prison and the northern gulags beginning in 1923. Christopher Zugger records that by 1936 the Byzantine Catholic Church of Georgia had served 8,000 believers through a bishop and four priests before that structure was destroyed. The bishop he identifies is Shio Batmalashvili, who was shot as an anti-Soviet element.