Who Are We?

Yes, we are Catholics in union with the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) whom we recognize as the visible Head of the Catholic Church. We are recognized as being "Catholic" by the local Roman Catholic Bishops and the Bishops of the United States of America and the whole world.

Having said that we are "Catholics", we must now state that we are NOT Roman Catholics, but Catholics who are identified as being Eastern Catholics. AS Catholics, we Eastern and Roman Catholics share the same faith and have the same seven sacraments. The difference is that we Eastern Catholics have a different way or rite of expressing our faith in regards to Liturgy and customs.

At the Last Supper, after Jesus changed bread and wine into His own Body and Blood, He told His disciples to "Do this in memory of me." This they did. As the disciples brought the Gospel to different parts of the world, they adapted ceremonies of the Liturgy to the customs and music of that people. In the end, four great centers of Christianity emerged with distinctive Christian customs, but the same faith.  These centers were located in the great cities of Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome and Alexandria.

A couple of centuries later when the capital of the Roman empire was moved to the Eastern city of Byzantium and renamed Constastantinople, an adaptation of the Antioch way of celebrating Liturgy was made. Thus a new center of Christianity arose in Constantinople and her ritual became known as the Byzantine Rite. From Constantinople the Slavic
peoples of Eastern Europe were converted by Sts. Cyril and Methodius and naturally followed the Byzantine Rite.

Today the Byzantine Rite is subdivided into ecclesiastical jurisdictions based on ethnic groupings, such as Greek, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Russian, etc. Our jurisdictions is that of the Ruthenians, a group of people who lived at the base of the Carpathian Mountains (east of Czecholslovakia, south of Poland and north of Rumania). Many came to the United States toward the end of the last century and settled in the mining towns of the East. After World War II, some came to the Western United States and settled here. In spite of this, our Holy Father Pope John Paul II established the Byzantine Catholic Diocese of Van Nuys in 1982 to care for the Byzantine Catholics of the Western United States. The Van Nuys Diocese is part of the Metropolitan Province of Pittsburgh which also includes the Archdiocese of Pittsburgh and the Dioceses of Passaic and Parma.

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