The Beautiful Witness of the Eastern Catholic Churches

The Catholic Herald (UK) ^ | 3/7/19 | Jon Anderson

[marshmallow]

There may only be 18 million Eastern Rite Catholics, but they make an astonishing contribution to the global Church

The coal country of north-eastern Pennsylvania is full of depressed small towns which have been losing population for decades. Today, if the region makes the news, it is for the social problems associated with the American Rust Belt. But at the end of the 19th century, this was a boom area, with immigrants from Europe – Poles, Germans, Italians – flocking there to work the mines.

It was and still is a strongly Catholic area, and reflecting the diversity of its inhabitants, it used to be common for a town to have multiple Catholic churches catering to the different ethnic groups there. But there are also hints of another tradition – onion-domed churches whose names might include “Orthodox” but more often “Greek Catholic”, and with cemeteries whose headstones are inscribed in a mix of Ukrainian, Russian, Slovak and Hungarian.

This mix does not reflect multiple ethnic groups, but the same one. The Rusyns, or Ruthenians, are little-known, and their American descendants mostly assimilated. Coming from the Carpathian mountain region where Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia meet, they are one of those small groups in Eastern Europe whose existence annoys tidy-minded nationalists – in the Soviet Union they were declared not to exist. Their traditional speech is either a separate language or a dialect of Ukrainian, depending on the politics of whomever you ask. And their religion, which looks Eastern Orthodox but is in fact Catholic, in full communion with Rome, is what you might expect from a group in Europe’s cultural borderlands.

The late comic artist Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, was a Rusyn from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. And the tightly knit community of Pittsburgh produced the most famous Rusyn-American, Andy Warhol. Despite being......

[redhead]

That's US! Images here.

[Ciaphas Cain]

I remember the Eastern Catholics singing at John Paul II’s funeral. It was quite beautiful.