Greek Catholics, these Christians who build a bridge between two worlds
There are nearly three and a half million in Ukraine, or nearly 7% of the population. The Greek-Catholic community is particularly visible in this country where there are nearly 3,400 active communities. They thus form the bulk of the Catholic presence in the country with a very large Orthodox majority. But while within these Orthodox Churches, the conflict in Ukraine reveals the increasingly deep fault lines between those attached to Moscow and those linked to the Patriarchate of Constantinople (current Istanbul), the Greek-Catholic communities, Catholic Christians of the Byzantine oriental rite but linked to Rome for a long time, potentially appear as a ferment of unity within a battered country. Not without having paid a heavy price in the past.
An Eastern Church with marked specificities
Long poorly regarded by the Orthodox communities they had left, the Uniate Churches (the other name of the Greek-Catholics) are not always well taken into account within the immense Catholic Church of the Roman rite whose liturgy and traditions differ in many ways. The possibility, in these Churches, for example, for parish priests to marry before their ordination, as is the case in all Eastern Churches, is one of the most striking examples.
Greek Catholics are also present in other Slavic countries. In Romania, mainly in Transylvania and Banat, nearly 700,000 faithful keep this tradition alive, although the community was heavily affected by the communist persecutions that began in 1948. The Church then had to bury itself, as in the times from the catacombs, and only came back to light in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since then, it has patiently risen and regained some of its churches. With nearly 5 bishoprics and nearly 750 priests, the Church also manages the significant diaspora of around a hundred Romanian Greek-Catholic parishes scattered throughout Europe and the United States.
Martyrs and memory of the years of communism
In neighboring Bulgaria, the reality of an ultra-minority Church is even more accentuated, with Catholicism representing only 1% of the overall population. Of the three dioceses, two are of the Latin rite and a third of the Byzantine rite. The memory of the martyrs of the 1950s, when communist persecution was particularly virulent, is a factor of unity. On November 11, 1952, Mgr. Evgueni Bossilkov, Passionist and Bishop of Nicopoli, and the Assumptionist Fathers Kamen Vitchev, Pavel Djidjov and Josaphat Chichkov were shot after an unfair trial. Among them, Father Kamen, 59, had been ordained in the Byzantine rite. Fifty years later, Pope John Paul II, on May 26, 2002, beatified these witnesses of the faith in Plovdiv.
From an ecclesial point of view, the future of these Eastern Churches is uncertain, sometimes considered as an obstacle to possible ecumenical reconciliation between the Churches. Unless the Ukrainian crisis shows that the opposite is happening: very engaged on the humanitarian front of the most threatened populations, the Greek-Catholic Church, at the interface between Western networks and the Orient, reveals itself as an actor in the potential unity of the country.