As those who have been here for a while know by now, the Eastern & Oriental Catholic Directory, generously hosted by ByzCath and still under construction, is an abiding passion of mine. Periodically, we get emails advising that the directory info has helped someone searching for a parish and statistics on 'hits' support that folks visit the site. So, there's no big surprises there, but it is gratifying to know.
Back when directory construction began, decisions had to be made as to what info would be included and formatting had to be tested. At the time, I decided that some small jurisdictions would serve best as guinea pigs because using them would make it possible to enter
all of a particular set of parishes and give the added satisfaction of a sense of completion.
That's why the Armenian eparchies in the Americas, and Belarusian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Russian parishes and missions in the diaspora came to be listed early on (together, of course, with Father Serge's UGCC parish in Dublin and that of our sister, Anhelyna, in Scotland
). The same thinking led me to enter parishes of the Bulgarian Exarchate, though very minimal information was available on any of the latter.
Imagine my surprise when I opened my directory e-mail last night to find a message from Bulgaria, providing detailed info on all the parishes and missions of the Exarchate of Sofia. (Altho the forum has a pretty broad European representation, I'm aware of only one Bulgarian member - our longtime friend and brother, AntonI, who posts to us from the UK.) So, I was pretty pleased to think that someone that far away discovered the directory and considered it an important enough resource to take the time to pass on the data needed to flesh out those entries.
I realize this post is of limited general interest, and I don't mean for it to come off as any sort of boast. But, frankly, I was just so pleased by the happening that I wanted to share it. Please forgive the monologue.
Many years,
Neil
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