If you don't already receive One Magazine, you should. They cover the Eastern Churches like no one else does. In the same magazine you can get a story on the Ethiopian Church, Ukrainians in Argentina, and the Paschal traditions of Jerusalem.
(One Magazine) - For more than a millennium, Central Europe’s Carpatho-Rusyns have been engulfed in a violent whirl of Magyar, Germanic and Slavic antagonism. Always subjugated, Rusyn peasants toiled the soil, kept the livestock or cut the timber of their Hungarian, Austrian or Polish masters. Such conditions, coupled with centuries of serfdom and forced assimilation, hardly favored the development of a distinct Rusyn identity. Nevertheless, among the Rusyns such an identity did develop, sowed by their distinct Slavic language, nurtured by their Byzantine Christianity — which they received from Sts. Cyril and Methodius in the late ninth century — and reinforced by their full communion, or unia, with the church of Rome.
Today, fewer than 900,000 Rusyn Greek Catholics are scattered throughout Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, North America, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine. A unified church, gathering them all under one mantle, does not exist. Rusyn Greek Catholics — also called Ruthenians — make up three distinct churches that, while sharing the same origins, traditions and culture, remain independent of each other...
Complete article here.
Posts
My Godmother is Carpatho-Rusyn. Thank you for this article.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this article and referencing the magazine, think I'll try a subscription.
ReplyDeleteI have been both Byzantine Catholic and Russian Orthodox (I still call OCA Russian), and I have experienced great disappointment in both.
I believe it was Pope John Paul II who made it clear that He wanted both the Ruthenian and Ukrainian Traditions to restore the Ancient Practices of their Churches. From what I have heard, the Ukrainians have maintained the status quo in North America (the Church in the Ukraine has begun doing so). The Ruthenians have gone the opposite way from my visits to 2 churches in recently years, introducing protestant praise music before Divine Liturgy, using 'Novus Ordo" style English translations, watered down Church dicipline, etc. There are exceptions in some congregations but not enough to influence the rest. Some
parishes are in decline as the children and grandchildren inter-marry either with Latin Rite Catholics or non-Catholics and move away. No one to carry on unfortunately. Very sad.
I'll pass on commenting on the OCA for now.
Pray for conversion of hearts East and West.