The Sad Collapse of the Byzantine Catholic Church

This is sad news! Whilst I am a member of the Serbian Rite, we have no Eparchy in the US, so I am subject to the Byzantine Eparch of Parma, OH.

From Crisis

D.P. Curtin 

While the Byzantine Catholic Church in America endures as a witness to a lost era, statistics point to its certain demise unless something drastic changes.

On the far end of South Philadelphia, at the end of its seemingly endless labyrinth of tight, narrow streets, is a small, gold-capped, domed church with its crumbling stairs facing the public sidewalks along 24th Street. Its cornerstone commemorates the construction of the new church in 1923, under the jurisdiction of the “Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church.” The narthex is fairly mundane, with commemorations to donors from the 1960s and ’70s and salient members of the parish prominently displayed on wall mountings. 

However, going into the basement reveals much older ghosts. Hung on the fading beadboards are pictures of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, with photos of long-forgotten Christmas pageants flanking various old newsprints that have been mounted. Kaiser Franz Josef, dead since 1916, stands sentinel at the end of the room over the community coffee pots. The parish itself dates from 1891, when 600 Carpatho-Rusyns settled the local neighborhoods, pooling their money to retain their ethnic heritage for the next generation. 

Today, the local parish bulletin publishes liturgy attendance. Sometimes it goes as high as 20, but most Sundays it averages around a dozen or so, including the priest and cantor. Part of the dome over the nave sags into the roof, a side chapel is rough and partially collapsed, and the celestial ceiling with the vision of Christ Pantocrator on it is marked with holes and water stains. The state of Holy Ghost is not anomalous. It is the material manifestation of the state of the whole of the Ruthenian Catholic Church, which is in heavy, if not potentially terminal, decline.

For the unfamiliar, the Ruthenian Catholic Church is an autonomous Eastern Catholic Church in union with Rome since the 16th century. In its history, it was under the protection of the King of Poland-Lithuania until that polity collapsed in the late 18th century. The eastern lands came under the jurisdiction of the Russian Empire and would become the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The western lands were tied to the Catholic Habsburg monarchy under Austria-Hungary. Despite the collapse of the latter in 1918, and the fact that Ruthenia is now part of Ukraine, these historic distinctions are still held to this day. 

Ruthenia’s history in the 20th century has been stormy, passing from Austria-Hungary to Czechoslovakia; from Czechoslovakia to Romania; from Romania to the Soviet Union; and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the modern Ukrainian Republic. Like many Eastern European groups, the height of their immigration was between 1890 and 1940 and would inform the state of the Ruthenian Church in the United States, which would flourish for some time in Pennsylvania and Ohio. However, the last three decades have seen a dramatic shift in the constitution of the Ruthenian Catholic Church (also known as the Byzantine Catholic Church).

To understand the contraction of the Byzantine Catholic presence in the United States, it is necessary to look squarely at the number of parishioners. In the mid-1990s, the Ruthenian Catholic Church in the United States reported roughly 190,000–200,000 faithful on its rolls, filling their pews weekly. However, by the late 2010s, after internal audits and demographic decline, that number of the faithful had fallen dramatically. 

Recent editions of the Official Catholic Directory list total membership closer to 55,000–60,000 nationwide. That is to say, within roughly 25 years, the Church has lost well over two-thirds of its recorded membership. This decline is not merely statistical housekeeping. Average Sunday attendance in many parishes now consists of a handful of very elderly parishioners who were brought up in the faith by their immigrant parents but were ultimately unable to transmit the rite to a new generation detached from the memory of Ruthenian heritage. Entire regions once dense with Carpatho-Rusyn and Slovak immigrants no longer sustain the vast parish networks they did in the 20th century.

What is more, the contraction in ordained clergy mirrors the drastic fall in church membership. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ruthenian Church in America could rely on well over 300 priests across its four major eparchies (the Eastern equivalent of dioceses). Today, that number is closer to 100–120 active priests, many of them well past retirement age. In some larger parishes, there is no resident clergy. They are granted a deacon or must share a priest between multiple parishes. 

In addition to this, the median age of Byzantine clergy continues to rise. While the Byzantine tradition permits married priests, vocations have not kept pace with attrition. In recent years, the Byzantine Catholic Church has been importing priests from Ukraine to cover its clerical shortage. Of course, the foreign priests only heighten the attrition of parishioners, who are now multiple generations removed from the “old country” and have no cultural or linguistic ties to Ruthenia.

In the past two decades, Byzantine parish closures and consolidations have accelerated as the financial apparatus that has supported these churches has collapsed. At its height, the Byzantine Church maintained over 200 parishes across the United States, most of them in the Atlantic Northeast. That number has fallen to roughly 80–90 canonical parishes and missions, with many church communities merged, reduced to mission status, or shuttered entirely. In industrial towns in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, once-vibrant domed churches now stand sold, repurposed, or demolished.

The financial dimension compounds the expanding demographic crisis. Small congregations struggle to maintain large, aging buildings constructed for immigrant congregations multiple times their current size. Insurance, heating, salaries, upkeep, and structural repairs alone often exceed annual offertory income, and fundraising is a challenge with an aging population. Several eparchies have quietly undertaken property sales to stabilize their freefalling budgets. 

While the Byzantine Church has not faced the high-profile bankruptcy proceedings famously seen in some Latin dioceses, it carries the structural burden of shrinking revenue streams against fixed institutional costs. The result is not an overnight collapse but a slow institutional corrosion. A church that once functioned as the religious and cultural heart of a thriving Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant population now exists as a relic of another time and place—faithful, liturgically rich, but increasingly fragile.

The larger question is not sociological but ecclesial: How does a church preserve a theological and liturgical patrimony when its identity has eroded? Should it even try? The Ruthenian experience may prove emblematic of a broader phenomenon in American Catholicism, where identity, assimilation, and secularization converge to hollow out communities that were founded to be permanent institutions. 

The golden onion domes still stand in some American cities. The Divine Liturgy is still celebrated. But the statistics tell a sobering story: the Byzantine Catholic Church in America is no longer a vibrant, thriving, immigrant church. It is a contracting inheritance that will soon fade into oblivion, saved only by the efforts of its clergy and administration. 

Perhaps this will not happen within this decade, or even within this generation, but it is likely to happen soon, even if we “do not know the day or the hour (Matthew 24:36). Until then, the great golden Byzantine domes will remain standing over the old neighborhood streets, bearing witness to a people, a faith, and a world that once filled them with life.

Pictured: His Grace Robert Pipta, Eparch of Parma