Eastern Catholic Churches

EASTErN CATHOLIC CHUrCHES. The term ECC designates local or regional Churches which follow an Eastern Church tradition, but having joined the Latin Church do not have communion with Churches of their own tradition which are not in communion with Rome. To almost all Eastern regional Churches of the Byzantine, East Syrian, West Syrian, Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopian tradition, there correspond currently smaller or greater ECC. *Vatican II expresses the highest appreciation for the ‘institutions of the Eastern Churches, their liturgical rites, ecclesiastical traditions and their ordering of Christian life’ (OE 1) According to OE 3, the individual Churches, both Eastern and Western, ‘are of equal rank, so that none of them is superior to the others because of its rite’ (*Orientalium ecclesiarum) Through the bishop of Rome the ECC enjoy among themselves and with all Catholic Churches of the Roman rite full institutional unity in ecclesial and sacramental communion. Where a local Catholic Church co-exists with other Catholic Churches it has, besides its own Synod, Church groups common to these. Different origins. The ECC joined the Latin Church at different times. Characteristic for agreeing to join the Catholic Church was 1) that – almost always – only a part of the Churches of a certain tradition accepted to do so; 2) that in the various periods of history in which this took place the ecclesiological assessment of what constitutes a ‘union’ is different so that, e.g., Catholics set as a pre-condition for the union the correction of all the errors with which they reproached the other side. In some other instances, however, where they raised the most serious reproaches as to the falsification of doctrine and the corruption of liturgical rites they were quick to grant union and expect the correction of errors only as a slow maturing fruit of that union.

That criticism has accompanied the emergence of certain ECC is understandable, for the great variety in the conditions under which unions came about shows that it was always difficult for the Churches in question to find the right process for the removal of divisions; moreover, the creation of new divisions by the conclusion of most unions suggests that great mistakes have often been made. Yet, it would be an injustice if criticism should be the cause of forgetting that those responsible for the processes were always inspired by the desire to comply with Christ’s command to be united with one another. It is known from experience that good intentions and the mistaken application of false methods do not necessarily exclude one another. Given the great differences in the way schisms were brought to an end, the recent designation ECC, used indistinctly for all Churches which derive from such unions as are described above, may easily lead to misunderstandings; yet the term is considered to be an improvement on the previously widely used designation of ‘Uniates’ The split between the Latin and Byzantine Churches, which had been symbolized by the mutual excommunications of the bishops of Rome and Constantinople in 1054, became definitive in the minds of the common people in the East after the *Crusades and the sacking of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204. One of the purposes of ecumenical councils (*Council, Ecumenical: Canonical and Theological Aspects) has been to heal divisions without creating new problems.

In the time when the seven Ecumenical Councils (*Seven Councils, Church of the) common to Latins and Greeks, were held, Rome and Constantinople, were quite frequently in schism – for roughly half of the time (217 out of 506 years, if we count from 381 (*Constantinople I) to 887 (death of *Photius), as Yves Congar says in his celebrated short study, After Nine Hundred Years: The Background of the Schism between the Eastern and the Western Churches (1959) Attempts at reunion took place at the Second Council of *Lyons in 1274 and at the Council of *Florence in 1439, but neither was successful. The current official theological dialogue likewise serves to promote union, but needs to be aware of history in order to avoid repeating its errors (*Dialogue and the Eastern Churches) The *Crusades and the ECC. When the Normans in the 11th century settled in Southern Italy where the inhabitants were Greek in rite, they wanted to appropriate this region for the Catholic Church, whereby they thought not in terms of Churches of a given tradition taken as a whole (e.g., the Byzantine rite), but only those Churches taken individually and governed by a bishop. To the extent that the Crusaders acknowledged that the sacraments administered by the Churches of Greek tradition had the same value as those of their own Latin Church, they only demanded, to re-establish union, that Latins should serve as ordinaries for the Greek Christians. In Calabria and Sicily there still exist, from that time on, two Byzantine-rite Churches governed by a bishop included among the ECC. When the Crusaders in the Middle East created their states, they too let a single bishop govern both Greeks and Latins.

After they had conquered Constantinople, they elevated a Latin, the Venetian Tommaso Morrosini, to the dignity of its patriarch and united this Patriarchate to Rome. Soon afterwards Lateran IV (1215), one of the 21 Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church, passed legislation which remained in force in Italy’s Venetian colonies until the end of their rule in the 17th–18th centuries. It comes as no surprise that the union of these Eastern Churches with Rome was soon abandoned as soon as the Crusaders or Venetians were driven away. At the time of the Crusades, the Maronites also became one of the ECC (*Maronite Church) A Church of West Syrian tradition, they lived in the Lebanese mountains, isolated from all Christians of the East and West, even from the other Churches of the West Syrian tradition. Given that the Crusaders could not extend their dominion to them, the Maronites chose to join the Catholic Church. They did it as a group and have remained united to Rome to this day as a group. Together with Italo-Greeks they are the only ECC which does not derive from a comparable non-united Church. The Armenian Church of the Cilician Kingdom in Asia Minor that was allied with the Crusaders accepted Church communion with the Latins, from whom it took many ideas for Church life. These ideas were forthwith passed on to the Church in the native country of the Armenians who had not been won over to the union. From this we gather that this union caused no separation between the Armenians who joined the union with Rome and those who did not. When the Jesuits came to South India and Ethiopia, they applied the canon law approved in Lateran IV to the Churches of the St Thomas Christians (*India, Eastern Christianity in) and to those of the Ethiopian Christians.

Considering both Churches to be heretical and their liturgical life to be corrupt, they nonetheless regarded them as being united with Rome and did not hesitate to become bishops for these Churches. In vain they tried for half a century to remove the heavily censured ‘errors’ of the Thomas Christians. Eventually the Thomas Christians split into two groups because part of them found the European influences unbearable. In Ethiopia a civil war broke out and the Jesuits were expelled from the country. Theological and ecclesial reaction. Subsequently, a Roman Catholic theology of the Church received a new impulse which vigorously emphasized the necessity of the direct jurisdiction of the pope over all the local Churches. This implied that Churches not under the pope’s jurisdiction could be considered objects of missionary activity for the purpose of bringing them into communion with the Catholic Church. At the same time, the notion of ‘rite’ developed, according to which groups of Eastern Christians who came into union with Rome would be absorbed into the single Church, but allowed to maintain their own liturgical tradition and canonical discipline. This missionary activity, which was sometimes carried out with the support of Catholic governments of countries with Orthodox minorities, was directed towards all the Eastern Churches. Eventually segments of virtually all of these Churches came into union with Rome. It should be recognized, however, that not all these unions were the result of the activity of Catholic missionaries. The Bulgarian Byzantine Catholic Church, for example, was the direct result of a spontaneous movement of Orthodox towards Rome. And the Maronites in Lebanon claim never to have been out of communion with the Roman Church. Inevitably, these unions resulted in a process of *latinization, or the adoption of certain practices and attitudes proper to the Latin Church, to a certain degree depending on the circumstances of the group. As a result, these Churches sometimes lost contact with their spiritual roots.

The monastic tradition, so central to Orthodox spirituality, died out in most of the ECC, although religious life often continued in the form of congregations modelled on Latin apostolic communities. After the Reformation. After the decline of the Byzantine Empire, the Churches of Greek tradition lost the emperor as coordinator in Church matters (*Autocephaly) and were hardly in a position to carry out a collective action. Indeed, those who came into the orbit of Poland and hungary came under the strong influence of the Reformation. Since they were not in a position to withstand this innovative influence by themselves, they sought help from the equally oppressed Church which cherished tradition, the Latin Church, which thanks to the Jesuits was able to hold its ground. In 1588 the synod of the then principality of Moldavia asked for sacramental communion with the Latin Church so as to receive support in so doing. however political confusion hindered the implementation of this plan. The Kievan Synod made the same request unanimously in 1595, but Rome interpreted this request for union other than as it was originally meant by the synod. As a result, a great part of those East Slavic Christians who had asked the synod to make the request distanced themselves from it in 1596, so that the Union reached at *Brest included only a part of the Kievan metropolis. On Austria’s border with the Ottoman Empire there settled in the 16th and 17th centuries refugees of the ‘Greek faith’ This is the origin of the diocese of Marča, which in the 1630s entered into communion with the Latin Church of Austria while retaining, for decades, the communion with the native – the Serbian – Patriarch. The inheritor of this union today is the local Catholic Church of Kriševci.

Eager to defend itself from the Reformed, the diocese of Mukačevo, a local Church of Greek tradition in the Upper hungary of that day, entered into communion with the Latins in 1646. That this did not imply breaking communion with those not united with Rome became clear when, in 1651, the second United bishop of Mukačevo, successor to the bishop who had accepted the union, received episcopal ordination at the hands of Bishop Ștefan of Alba Julia, who was not in union with Rome. The faithful of Mukačevo’s diocese belonged to various linguistic groups; the inheritors of this Union are today’s Catholic local Churches of Mulačevo in Ukraine, Prešov in Slovakia, and hajdugorod in hungary and Baia Mare, which belongs to the Romanian Uniate Church. The last of the local Churches of Greek tradition which made the decision in synod through a union with the Latins to seek defence from the Reformed, was the Romanian local Church of Transylvania. It likewise wanted to enter into communion with the Latins as one group, but the Catholics behaved in such a way that out of complete union there resulted only a partial union; and Transylvanian Uniates quickly came to oppose the Transylvanian Orthodox. Around this time there came to prevail in the Western and Eastern Churches a re-evaluation of schism with the result that a completely new understanding of union emerges. Until then the Churches in schism with one another had accused the other side of deviations which would qualify them as tarnished and compromised in their Church dignity. And yet, in spite of these ‘shortcomings’, their opponents never questioned their status as a Church.

The search for union meant that, in their opinion, the Church sought a compromise for the fact that, in spite of their historical appearance of being divided, they still belonged to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Now however, the conviction became deeply rooted among Latin theologians that whatever took place outside of the pope’s pastoral competence took place outside of the Church; without the pope’s aid there could be no genuine spiritual powers for Church office-holders so that sacraments administered by bishops and priests without the jurisdictional links to the pope were not allowed, being considered illegal, not to say, invalid. As a logical consequence Catholic theologians came to doubt the fully valid sacramental character of Church life for all ‘schismatics and heretics’ Beyond the canonical confines of the Roman Church’s communion under the pope they claimed to see only communities of the erring, whose faithful were to be urged for the sake of their salvation to join the Church under the pope. In 1729, a disposition of Propaganda Fide replaced the canon law passed at Lateran IV with a new canonical disposition corresponding to the new shifts in ecclesiology prohibiting any spiritual communion with those not united with Rome. Somewhat later, in 1745, the Greek patriarchs declared the Latin Christians to be ‘unholy and not even baptized’ Thus began a period of about two hundred years when the Catholics and the Orthodox believed in converting the faithful of the other Churches for Christ’s love and their salvation. Catholics felt obliged to set up at least a small Uniate Church wherever there were Eastern non-Catholic Christians, as happened in Constantinople and Greece at the end of the 19th century and at St Petersburg in 1909. For them, only these tiny ECC represented the true Church of Christ in these countries, whereas they negated the validity of the venerable old Eastern Churches there.

While the Orthodox had little success in trying to persuade the Latins to join their Church, at least they sought to gain the Uniates to their Church for the salvation of their souls. COR; PIO, CCEO. Since the Vatican II, efforts have been made to reverse this process. All of these churches come under the jurisdiction of the Pope through the Congregation for the Oriental Churches (COR) (*Congregation for the Eastern Church/Churches), one of the offices of the Roman Curia. It was created in 1862 as part of the Propaganda Fide (which oversaw the Church’s missionary activity), and was made an autonomous Congregation by Benedict XV in 1917. It has the same role with regard to bishops, clergy, religious and the faithful in the Eastern Catholic Churches that other offices of the Curia have in relation to the Latin Church. The Oriental Congregation also oversees the prestigious *Pontifical Oriental Institute (PIO) in Rome, which is under the direction of the Jesuits and has one of the best libraries for Eastern Christian Studies in the world. Nowadays, the term ‘Uniate Churches’ is considered derogatory and is no longer used. Most Orthodox view these Churches as an obstacle in the way of reconciliation between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. They feel that their very existence constitutes a denial by Catholics of the ecclesial reality of the Orthodox Church, and that these unions grew from efforts to split local Orthodox communities. They tend to consider Eastern Catholics either as Orthodox whose presence in the Catholic Church is an abnormal situation brought about by coercive measures, or even as Roman Catholics pretending to be Orthodox for the purpose of proselytism. Calling upon Eastern Catholics to rediscover their authentic traditions, OE also affirmed that Eastern Catholics have a special vocation to foster ecumenical relations with the Orthodox.

The ecclesial life of the ECC is governed in accordance with the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (*Codex Canonum Orientalium Ecclesiarum), which was promulgated by Pope John Paul II on 18 October 1990, and began to have the force of law on 1 October 1991. According to the new Oriental Code, the Eastern Catholic Churches fall into four categories: 1) Patriarchal (the *Chaldean, *Armenian, *Coptic, *Syrian, *Maronite, and *Melkite Churches), 2) Major Archiepiscopal (*Ukrainian, *Romanian, *Syro-Malabar and *Syro-Malankara Catholic Churches), 3) *Metropolitan Churches sui iuris (the *Ethiopian, *Slovak, and American *Ruthenian Churches), and 4) other Churches sui iuris (*Bulgarian; Greek, hungarian (*hungary, Eastern Churches in) and *Italo-Albanian, Churches, as well as the jurisdictions in former Yugoslavia) The Belarusian, Albanian, Georgian and Russian Eastern Catholic Churches have no hierarchy. ECC in the age of dialogue. The way these matters were handled in these 200 years was called by the Orthodox-Catholic Dialogue ‘uniatism’ (*Orientalium ecclesiarum) The Joint Catholic-Orthodox Commission at Balamand (2003) rejected it as ‘a way to unity contradicting the tradition of our Churches’, because it ignored that the sister Church against which it was directed, also offered itself a means of grace and salvation. Of all ECC, even of those which had come about through uniatism, the Commission said in the *Balamand Declaration that they had ‘the right to exist as part of the Catholic community and to minister to the spiritual needs of their faithful’

The current Prefect of the Oriental Congregation is Cardinal Leonardo Sandri (born 1943, appointed 2007) texts: Vatican II, Orientalium ecclesiarum (1964); Codex Canonum Orientalium Ecclesiarum (1990) studies: Y. Congar, After Nine Hundred Years: The Background of the Schism between the Eastern and the Western Churches, P. Mailleux (tr.), New York 1959; D. Attwater, The Christian Churches of the East, 1, Milwaukee WI 1961; R. Janin, Les églises orientales et les rites orientaux, Paris 19544; Y. Congar, After Nine Hundred Years: The Background of the Schism between the Eastern and the Western Churches, P. Mailleux (tr.), New York 1959; W. de Vries, Rom und die Patriarchate des Ostens, Freiburg i.Br. 1963; Oriente cattolico, M. Lacko (ed.), Vatican City 19744; E. Lanne, ‘La conception post-tridentine de la primauté et l’origine des Eglises unies’, Irén 52 (1979) 5–33; J. hajjar, Les chré- tiens uniates du Proche-Orient, Paris 1982; M. Van Parys, ‘Les Eglises orientales catholiques et l’oecuménisme’, Irén 64 (1991) 323–331; B. Petras, ‘The Ecumenical Status of the Eastern Catholic Churches’, The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 37 (1992) 349–381, Response by R. M. haddad, 383–391; D. Salachas, Istituzioni di diritto canonico delle Chiese cattoliche orientali, Bologna 1993; E. C.

Suttner, ‘Ein ökumenischer Traum’, Der christliche Osten 53 (1998) 286–290; E. C. Suttner, Die Christenheit aus Ost und West auf der Suche nach dem sichtbaren Ausdruck für ihre Einheit, Würzburg 1999; M. Vattappalam, The Congregation for the Eastern Churches: Origins and Competence, Rome 1999; Las Iglesias Orientales, A. González Montes (ed.), Madrid 2000; E. C. Suttner, Schismen, die von der Kirche trennen, und Schismen, die von ihr nicht trennen, Freiburg i.Br. 2003; E. G. Farrugia, ‘Re-Reading Orientalium Ecclesiarum’, Gregorianum 88 (2007) 352–371; W. hage, Das orientalische Christentum, Stuttgart 2007; Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics, A. O’Mahony (ed.), London 2008; A. E. Siecienski, ‘Eastern Catholic Churches’, EEOC 1:198– 199; M. Jalakh, Ecclesiological Identity of the Eastern Catholic Churches: Orientalium Ecclesiarum 30 and Beyond, Rome 2014. E. C. Suttner, R. Roberson.

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Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Christian East

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