Submenu Categories--------SELECT ARTICLE Historical Timeline A Short History The Old Country Coming to America The First Churches The Struggle for Recognition Renewed Efforts to Organize A Greek Catholic Bishop Comes to America The Episcopacy of Bishop Basil Tackach The Episcopacy of Bishop Daniel Ivancho The Episcopacy of Bishop Nicholas T. Elko A Change in Status Results in Two Eparchies New Honor; New Bishops and A New Eparchy The First Metropolitan The Episcopate of Bishop Michael J. Dudick The Eparchy of Parma The Byzantine Catholic Church in the West: The Eparchy of Van Nuys The Church in Transition Looking to the Future

Photo of some of the earliest Greek Catholic clergy to serve in America

The arrival of substantial numbers of Eastern Catholics to the United States found the American Church ill-prepared to handle them. The sudden appearance of increasing numbers of people who professed to be Catholic, but who followed different traditions, used a different liturgical language and conducted a different manner of public worship, was extremely disconcerting to the American Catholic hierarchy for several reasons.

First and foremost, most Roman Catholic bishops and clergy lacked even the most elementary knowledge of the Eastern Church. Knowing only the Latin Rite, the American bishops and clergy could only think of the Church in terms of uniformity and conformity rather than its universality and diversity. Given such a mind set, it was virtually inconceivable to them that these newcomers, with their married priests and non-Latin liturgy, could possibly be adherents to the same religious faith. Because of their nonconforming liturgy, language and traditions, many members of the American hierarchy in ignorance viewed the newly arrived Greek Catholics as a threat to be contained, if not outright eliminated, rather than as a welcome and complementary source of new religious vitality.

Second, the arrival of these "different Catholics" added a further complication to the ongoing efforts undertaken to suppress the development of so-called "ethnic" churches. Led by Archbishop John Ireland of Minneapolis, Minnesota, certain members of the hierarchy felt ecclesiastical solidarity was threatened by too close an identification and organization of the Church in America along ethnic lines. By attempting to suppress the development of ethnic churches, these hierarchs hoped to make the Catholic Church in the United States more unified and dynamic by making it more "American" in outlook. The presence of the new Greek Catholics, who wished to differentiate and organize themselves not only in ethnicity but also in rite, confounded and deeply disturbed the leaders of the Americanization movement.

Given their complete identification with the Latin Rite and the fierce resistance to nationality churches, many Roman Catholic bishops took a decidedly unfriendly, if not outright hostile, attitude toward the new Greek Catholics. Viewing their lack of celibacy as a great source of scandal, the bishops granted little or no material aid to the married Greek Catholic clergy. Furthermore, the hierarchs refused on many occasions to grant faculties or formal ecclesiastical permission to conduct Greek Catholic services in their churches or to grant ordinary jurisdiction to assume pastoral duties at a Greek Catholic parish. Repeatedly, the American bishops took up the matter of the "Greek Rite Priests" at their annual meetings and wrote to the Holy See in Rome demanding that only celibate priests who submitted to the jurisdiction of the local Latin bishop be permitted to minister to the Greek Catholics in the United States.

The animosity of the Roman Catholic hierarchy was in some measure reciprocated by the immigrant Greek Catholic faithful and the handful of pioneer clergy. Some clergy resisted the orders of the local bishop and conducted their pastoral duties among the Greek Catholic faithful by claiming their faculties from the European bishops who permitted them to come to America. In the meantime, the organizers of the various Greek Catholic parishes, fearful of attempts to suppress their Eastern rite practices and traditions, refused to transfer parish property into the name of the local Roman Catholic bishop. Instead, individual Greek Catholic parishes generally kept their properties titled in the name of the parish as a nonprofit corporation. Thus, the church properties could be ultimately controlled by a lay board of trustees, rather than be held in trust by the local bishop.

With tensions between the American Catholic bishops and the Greek Catholic clergy and faithful escalating, the Holy See in Rome intervened. In an attempt to clarify the situation, on October 1, 1890, the Holy See issued a decree concerning Greek Catholics in the United States. This decree instructed the newly arriving Greek Catholic priests to obtain jurisdiction from and to function under the authority of the local Roman Catholic bishop. Additionally, the decree stated all Greek Catholic priests functioning in America should be celibate. All married priests, according to the decree, should be recalled to Europe.

Rather than resolving the situation, the Vatican's decree only served to exacerbate the relationship between the bishops, the Greek Catholic clergy and faithful. Inevitably, these differences between the American Catholic hierarchy and the Greek Catholic clergy and faithful ended in a schism.

At a meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Father Alexis Toth was harshly rebuffed by the Roman Catholic Bishop John Ireland. The parish had no services that paschal season. Later that year Father Toth and his parish of 361 souls petitioned the Russian Orthodox bishop, residing at that time in San Francisco, to accept them under his jurisdiction. After investigations and exchanges of visits, this was accomplished. A zealous missionary, Father Toth, by the time of his death in 1909, brought fifteen Carpatho-Rusin parishes with over twenty thousand souls into the Orthodox Church.