Greek Byzantine Catholic Church

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The Greek Byzantine Catholic Church is a particular Church within the Catholic Church and uses the Byzantine liturgical rite in the Koine Greek and modern Greek languages. Its membership includes inhabitants of Greece and Turkey.

[edit] History

Although, after the failure of the attempts by the Council of Lyon in 1274 and by the Council of Florence in 1439 to repair the breach of the East-West Schism between Greek and Latin Christians, many individual Greeks, then under Ottoman rule, embraced Catholicism, it was not until the 1880s that a sui juris church specifically for Greek Catholics who followed the Byzantine Rite was built in the village of Malgara in Thrace. Before the end of the nineteenth century two more such churches were built, one in Constantinople, the other in Kadiköy, Turkey.

Much more numerous were the Greek Catholics of Latin Rite, who formed the majority of the population in some Aegean islands (e.g. on Rodos). To a large extent these Catholics were fully Hellenized descendants of Venetians, Genoese and Amalfitans who had settled in Greece for trading and other reasons.

In 1907 a native Greek priest, Father Isaias Papadopoulos, the priest who had built the church in Thrace, was appointed vicar general for the Greek Catholics within the apostolic delegation of Constantinople, and in 1911 he was given episcopal consecration and put in charge of the newly established ordinariate for Greek Catholics, which later became an exarchate. Thus was founded the particular Church of Byzantine Rite Greek Catholics.

As a result of the conflict between Greece and Turkey after the First World War, the Greek Catholics of Malgara and of the neighbouring village of Daudeli moved to Yannitsa in Macedonia, and many of those who lived in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) emigrated to Athens, among them the episcopos who had succeeded to the position of Exarch and the religious institute of the Sisters of the Pammakaristos, founded in 1920.

In 1932 the territory of the Exarchate for Byzantine-Rite Greek Catholics was limited to that of the Greek state, and a separate Exarchate of Constantinople was established for those resident in Turkey. Due to continued emigration and anti-Greek nationalist incidents by Turks, the Greek Catholics of the latter exarchate have become reduced to extremely few. The last resident Greek-Catholic priest in Constantinople died in 1997 and has not since been replaced, and the only regular services in the Greek-Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity there are held by Chaldean Catholics.

The Catholics of the exarchate for Greece, who were never very numerous, are now outnumbered by the Ukrainian Catholic immigrants in its care, who are assisted also by priests and religious sisters from Ukraine. Vocations to the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church are largely drawn from the Greek islands of Syros and Tinos, which both have sizeable Greek Catholic (and indeed also Latin Rite Roman Catholic) populations, due to the many years of Venetian rule, under which Union with Rome was encouraged.

Kyr Anargyros (Printezis) of Gratianopolis, current Catholic Apostolic Exarch of Greece of the faithful of Eastern Rite (Byzantine), was born in 1937 (16 August) in the village of Vari, on the island of Syros. In 1961 (10 December) he was ordained a priest in Rome by Gabriel Acacius Cardinal Coussa (Born 1897-Died 1962), B. A.. He was consecrated bishop in 1975 (6 August) by the Melkite Archbishop of Petra and Filadelfia (Appointed 1970- Retired 1992) Saba Youakim (Born 1914-Died 2003), B.S., and two officials of the Roman Curia, the Romanian titular bishop of Lebedus Vasile Cristea (Born 1906-Died 2000), A.A., and the Archbishop Miroslav Stefan Marusyn (Born 1924-Retired 2001), titular bishop of Cadi.