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Greetings All,

As all of us know the Eastern Catholic churches are a diverse group of devoted followers of Christ. Each w/ their own unique liturgical customs that add to the vast diversity found within the One, Catholic Church. My question today concerns the Hungarian Catholic Church (Not the Roman Catholic church in Hungary)
I know very liitle about them. Of what I do know is the following;

1. During the 1600s many Orthodox faithful in Magyar territory, bacame Catholic, while retaining their Byzantine culture.

2. During the early 18th century a group of Hungarian nobles (calvanists) became Catholic, and joined the Byzantine rite.

3. In 1795 the Divine Litrugy of St. John Chrysostom was translated into Magyar (Hungarian)

4. In the 1900s Pope Leo X (?) erected a distict Diocese for the Hungarian Byzantines.

5. They currently have 282,000 followers worlwide.

This is all I know of them. My questions are;

1. After the Pope, who is their current leader and title?

2. Are they a metropolitan church?

3. Are there any Hungarian-rite parishes in the US?

4.What is their relationship to the Ruthenian Church?

5. Do they allow married men to the priesthood in Hungary?

Thanks again,

Peace of Christ
ProCatholico

Dear ProCatholico,

A number of them are also Magyarized Ruthenians and Ukrainians. We have about six or so parishes of them up here, one or two in Hamilton.

My grandfather ministered to them during the war and told me that they were very devoted to the Divine Office and to Byzantine traditions.

Links between Hungary and the Church of Kyivan Rus' go back a long way.

The Crown of St Stephen is a Byzantine style Crown, made in the Kyivan Caves Lavra itself.

There are some Eastern Saints of Hungarian background, the one I am most familiar with is St Moses the Hungarian of the Kyivan Caves who is the Patron of purity for youth (O.K. Kurt, O.K. ).

St Paisius Velichkovsky, a monastic reformer, counted Eastern Rite Hungarians among the ten ethnic groups that comprised his followers.

God bless,

Alex

Dear OrthodoxCatholic,

Thank you for your response. But I ask you, are the Hungarian parishes by you of Hungarian rite, or Ruthenian rite? Also what about my other questions. I'd like to know a little more. Anyone's input is greatly appreciated.

God Bless,

ProCatholico

Hungarian Greek Catholics in the United States are subject to the Ruthenian Metropolia. A number of parishes including Holy Cross in NYC are Hungarian. (Holy Cross Church has wonderful murals of Hungarian Christian history on the walls of the church.) Not to answer for Alex, but I believe in Canada, the Hungrain Greek Catholics are subject to the Ukrainian Metropolia.

In Hungary they consist of an eparchy, directly dependent on the Holy See, and an Apostolic Administration, which consists of those parishes that were formerly part of the Mucheveko Eparchy before the creation of the Czechoslovak state. Since the Communists came to power, both offices have been held by the same person, though they have never been formally merged.

Under the Hungarian monarchy, the eparchy was a suffergan see of the Primate of Hungary. The Holy See ended this practice at the first opportunity. It hard to speak of particular traditions of the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church, as for the most part they are a creation of shifting borders and national consciousness.

The Church has no Orthodox counterpart and ordains married and unmarried men to the priesthood. They are quite strict about not accepting married transritualists as candidates for the priesthood. While they suffered under the Communists greatly, unlike elsewhere, the Greek Catholics were not treated differently than the Latins. They shared in the passion of the holy Cardinal Midvensky.

K.

[This message has been edited by Kurt K (edited 08-21-2001).]

In the 15th and 16th centuries, after the turkish invasion, eastern orthodox inmigrants became byzantine catholics and in the 18th some protestant hungarians and a group of jews joined the eastern rite church. They were placed under the jurisdiction of non-Hungarian Byzantine bishops.

Once this community of Greek Catholics was integrated into Hungarian society, some began to press for the use of the Hungarian language in the liturgy. But such a proposal was resisted by the church authorities. For this reason, the first Hungarian translation of the liturgy of John Chrysostom and the liturgical books were published in the 19th but their use was still not approved by the ecclesiastical authorities.

In 1900 a group of eastern christians from Hungary presented Pope Leo XIII a petition asking him to approve the use of Hungarian in the liturgy and to create a distinct diocese for them. So the Holy See erected the diocese of Hajd�dorog but the use of Hungarian was limited to non-liturgical functions: the liturgy was to be celebrated in old Greek and the clergy were given three years to learn it although the requirement to use Greek was never enforced and in 1930 the rest of the necessary liturgical books were published in Hungarian.

On June 4, 1924, an Apostolic Exarchate was established at Miskolc for 21 Ruthenian parishes formerly in the diocese of Pre�ov that remained in Hungarian territory after Czechoslovakia was created. They were provided with a distinct identity because they used Slavonic in the liturgy. By the 1940s, however, they had all begun to use Hungarian, and the apostolic exarchate since that time has been administered by the bishop of Hajd�dorog.

Since 1980 the diocese of Hajd�dorog was extended to all Greek Catholics in Hungary.
The head of the church is His Grace Szil�rd Keresztes (born 1932, appointed 1988), bishop of Hajd�dorog and Apostolic Administrator of Miskolc, who resides in Nyiregyh�za.


The Greek Catholic Hungarians who immigrated to North America have a few parishes, all of them part of the Ruthenian dioceses in the USA and the Ukrainian dioceses in Canada.

Thank you all for writing me back.

You have all really clarified the Hungarian-rite for me. But now I have yet another question, I hope someone can answer. It was stated that basically the Hungarian rite came into being due to national border changes, etc. So my question is, if the Hungarian immigrants to the US joined the Ruthenian church, why do they not unite in their respective lands? If they are so similar anyways. Oh, and it was said that they have no orthdox counterpart, yet the Maronites pride themselves on being the only church in Roman communion that have no EO counterpart? Thanks again.

God Bless You,

ProCatholico

If what you mean by "Magyar territory" is areas that were historically ethnic-Hungarian, then you are mistaken about this.

In northeast Hungary (where most of the indigenous Greek Catholic faithful are), in the counties of Abauj, Borsod, Szatmar, Szabolcs, Zemplen, the faithful are almost exclusively magyarized Romanians and Carpathian People(tm).

At the monastery of Pocs (now Mariapocs), almost 3/4 all the monks in 1803 were documented to be of Carpathian People(tm) nationality [i.e., "Ruszin"] but from villages which are today still in Hungary and entirely Hungarian-speaking.

In virtually all the historical churches in such villages (anything dating from the late 19th century or before), the icon inscriptions and icon murals are inscribed in Church Slavonic, in Cyrillic. In the other places, in Romanian.

I think that the seperation is somewhat due to the ethnic differences. Although many Carpatho-Rusyns and Slovaks did know Hungarian fluently, it is not very similar to Slovak, Ukrainian, Rusyn, (or Old Slavonic).

It is important to keep in mind that Hungary controlled a significant amount of territory in what is now Slovakia and the Transcarpathian districts. Early in the 20th Century (and towards the end of the 19th), there were campaigns to "Madgyrize" these areas, with Hungarian as the "favorite language of choice". This tended to be a common strategy when one ethnic group dominates another, and we even see evidence of this in our own day and age. The problem was, the Slovaks and Rusyns didn't always like it. (Nor did the Rusyns like it when the Slovaks tried the same thing after the establishment of Czecho-Slovakia.)

Although this may not explain totally why there are independent Eparchies in Europe today, I tend to believe that this influenced it.

Also, it should be kept in mind that the Uzhorod Eparchy was totally decimated after the Second World War, along with the Presov Eparchy. Presov existed solely in the underground unitl the mid 1960's, and Uzhorod until the 1990's. There was virtually no way for the Hungarians to rely on Presov or Uzhorod for many years. For the Byzantine Hungarians' Eparchy to be extended in 1980--that was pretty dog gone lucky!

These are my ideas on the subject and I claim no final authority (or Primacy) on the subject, I defer to those with a more complete understanding than mine .

One could also remark about the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church in Hungary that because it was never abolished or really persecuted, it was able to accept and deal with the Second Vatican Council. Thus, it has undergone somewhat of a "Byzantine renaissance" and is a flourishing Church, no longer terribly Latinized, and quite progressive! Many young (married) vocations, vibrant city & suburban parishes, and a strong liturgical life. We should be so blessed!

Dear Friends,

Yes, the Hungarian Greek CAtholics are under the Ukrainian Metropolia in Canada.

Again, there might be an issue with the notion of what a "Hungarian Greek Catholic" is.

I have met Hungarian historians who deny that their Greek Catholics are truly "Hungarian" but are from "Marmarosh Orsag" and are Magyarized Slavs.

Certainly, there are such Magyarized Slavs and they used the Chuch Slavonic until they reverted to Hungarian.

The oppression against the Slavs under Hungary was fierce and unrelenting.

That the Greek Catholics here and there call themselves "Hungarian" is no surprise, therefore.

Alex

The Hungarian Greek Catholic Church in Hungary is organized, I believe, as an exarchate.
In Canada, the Hungarian Greek Catholic parishes would be under the Ukrainian Bishop (Toronto, I believe?). One in particular was in Windsor, Ontario, which unfortunately closed in December 2000.
In the United States the Hungarian parishes are all part the Byzantine Ruthenian Church. Parishes include St John�s in Solon Ohio, one in Perth Amboy NJ and one in Bridgeport, Conn. There are others which I am not particularly familiar with. Originally, these parishes were organized within close Hungarian neighborhoods. Subsequently, as the Hungarians left their ethnic neighborhoods and spread throughout the suburbs (i.e., Buckeye Road in Cleveland), the original Hungarian character became less distinct. Many of these parishes today have their identity in the American converts from their new neighborhoods and thus have had to drop the ethnic Hungarian in the Divine Liturgy.

Regarding the Hungarian translation of the Divine Liturgy: It was in 1868 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire forced the �magyarization� of the liturgical texts. The Empire deemed it necessary that the empire�s language be either Austrian or Hungarian. The Rusyns living in the northeast section of the empire were forced to drop their Old Slavonic texts and replace them with Hungarian translations. This was quite a brutal time for the Greek Catholics in the empire, but they had little option but to comply. Then, as the European immigration to the US increased in the late 1800�s and early 1900�s, the Rusyn Greek Catholics in Hungary brought their priests, liturgy and tradition � now magyarized to Hungarian � into the U.S. For the generations since 1868, Hungarian was the �natural� language and became part of the Hungarian culture in the U.S.

Additional information is available in publications from Fr. A. Pekar (not sure of his titles).

Deacon El

It should also be noted that we have had (I think he may have ow retired) a bishop who was Aposoltic Visitator for Hungarain Catholcis of both rites in the USA.

K.

I know that the Romanian Byzantine Catholics in Canada have their own exarchate within the Ukrainian Metropolia. I don't know if they also have hungarian parishes (I'll ask some information to Father Radu Roscanu, the apostholic administrator)
The eastern christians with Albanian and Greek roots are a small minority and I think they're part of the ukrainian metropolia and they don't have their own exarchate.
On the contrary the slovak eastern catholics have their own diocese and some hungarian parishes are part of the slovak diocese.

I believe that St. Nicholas,in Roebling, NJ is also Hungarian of the eparchy of Passaic.
They have a Hungarian picnic every year, in July, I believe.

There is an Hungarian Byz. parish, St. George, in Youngstown, OH

Dear Remie:

Do you know if this Eparchy has a web site?

Thank you very much,

Stefan

From one of my old posts...

When the Exarchate of Pittsburgh was created in 1924, the existing Hungarian parishes were made a part of it, along with all "Ruthenian" Greek Catholics who came from the former Kingdom of Hungary (Romanians were excluded from this). Virtually all the parishes were pre-existing, and they were officially designated as Magyar (Hungarian) parishes.

In the intervening 75+ years, many of them have dwindled and been closed (e.g., two in Youngstown, Ohio; one each in Detroit and Chicago; Trenton, NJ). Others still exist in Toledo, Lorain, & Solon, Ohio; Munhall, PA (St. Elias, not the cathedral parish); Duquesne, PA; McKeesport, PA; Bridgeport, CT; New Brunswick, NJ; and Perth Amboy, NJ. There is one in Manhattan as well.

Also St. Mary's in Coatesville, PA, while not officially designated as a Magyar parish, had a majority of its congregation as Magyar-speaking.

In the U.S., most of the Hungarian Greek Catholics were assimilated (Magyarized) Carpathian people; a minority were assimilated Romanians.

Today the remaining Hungarian element is mostly given lip service in the Byzantine American(ized) Metropolia.

Also, of course, there remains the Monastery of the Basilian Fathers of Mariapocs at Matawan, New Jersey, most of whom are natives of Hungary.

Dear Stefan Ivan:

If you asked me about the Slovak diocese of Canada, I've been searching and they don't have a web site.
The Roumanian Greek Catholic Exarchate of Canada has an very small web page but it hasn't been finished:
You can e-mail Father Radu but he's quebecois and he doesn't speak english (I'm not sure).
http://www3.sympatico.ca/radu.roscanu/

This page has a lot of links: http://www.ucet.ca/links.html

c ya!

I had posted a reply to one of the messages in this discussion prior to the old server crashing and my reply did not survive, so I will re-post.

In response to the topic of Hungarian Greek Catholics, there exist several parishes in Ontario, Canada with three in the Niagara-Hamilton region and one in Windsor, Ontario which was in error mentioned as being closed.

Protection of The Mother of God parish in Windsor (St. Mary's) is indeed very much alive and has a very dynamic pastor, Father Louis Angyal, who is bi-ritual and also serves the Hungarian Roman Catholic parish and also ministers as a school and hospital chaplain.

The Hungarians also have an Arch-priest, Very Rev. Stephen Bodnar of St. George's Hungarian Byzantine in Courtland, Ontario.

It is correct that they are part of the Ukrainian Eparchy of Toronto.

Are not the Hungarian Catholics in Ontario part of the Slovak Eparchy of Sts. Cyril and Methodius? The clergy from the Slovak eparchy are included in the Ukrainian Catholic clergy directory, but I was under the impression that they have some kind of sui juris standing.

As I write, have in my hand the PRAYER BOOK for Greek Catholic Hungarians of America published 1940 by Rev. Julius Grigassy in English amd Magyar.

Rev. Julius Grigassy... whose grandson is a Catholic priest, currently living in Maryland.

Earlier it was mentioned that the Hungarian Greek Catholics in Ontario might be part of the Slovak Eparchy in Canada, however they actually fall under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Eparchy of Toronto and Eastern Canada. The Hungarian churches as well as their location and priests are included in the Ukrainian Eparchy's web site. As far as the Slovak clergy being included in the Ukrainian clergy directory, at one time they were but I am not sure if that is still the case.

This is what I have been trying to figure out. Thanks Rich, and look how long ago you posted it!

Slovaks in Canada were given their own Eparchy some time ago. Stephen Roman, a wealthy member, has a Cathedral built north of Toronto.
That Cathedral was the centerpiece of a new real-estate development. A controversy emerged leading to:


Romanians in Canada were under the Toronto Ukrainian Eparchy but were transferred to the Canton (Ohio) Romanian Eparchy about a decade ago

I would very much like to see the creation of a Byzantine Catholic Patriarchate in Kiev uniting all Eastern Catholic communities of Ruthenian tradition, but I also believe that this will still take a long time.

There are two Byzantine rite Hungarian parishes still in the Toronto Ukrainian Eparchy (Hamilton & Welland, Ontario):

Toronto Eparchy website [ucet.ca]

The problem with this idea is that it could play into the Triune Rus people (Russians + Ukrainians + Belarussian) myth being peddled by some groups.

An alternative would be to have a form of joint inter-church sui iuris synod. I remember reading an article discussing about how the former Melkite Patriarch suggested the establishment of such a synod between the Byzantine-Rite churches sui iuris. Instead of being overly dependent on the Dicastery for Oriental Churches, Byzantine-Rite churches without their own synods nor Patriarchs/Major Archbishops could be under oversight of said joint synod. Additional forms of synods are not entirely unprecedented because the eparchies and monastery of the (Greco-Albanian) Byzantine Catholic Church in Italy already had "Inter-eparchial synods" before.

It is a very interesting possibility, I believe that it would help in an autonomous and also mutual growth among the many communities of the Eastern churches. I believe that it would also help, if possible, to integrate the communities of the Orthodox churches into communion with Rome.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of online sources in English make cryptic references to Hungarian Protestants choosing to convert specifically to Uniatism during the Counter-Reformation and there's usually some explanation given about how these Protestants (sometimes it's Lutherans, sometimes it's Calvinists like in the blurb above) chose it out of spite because as converts under Uniate bishops they could use Church Slavonic over Latin.

There're so many problems with this story. Church Slavonic isn't any closer or more of a vernacular for Hungarian-speakers than Latin would be. If that story were true, I would expect to see Hungarian Greek Catholic Church pockets way deeper north and west into what is now Slovakia and Hungary, but its bases map exactly onto where the Christian Orthodox Ruthenians and Romanians exist(ed) in the two countries. Why would the losing side who got forced into Catholicism choose a movement that was mistreated whose adherents were second class citizens in the Austrian Empire if their goal was to dodge persecution? Finally, I would imagine that the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom would be more of a culture shock to culturally germanized, Hungarian Lutherans or Calvinists than the Latin rite. Latin was the language of academia for the entire Western world of the 16th-19th Centuries (and Hungary's own administrative language until 1874 if I recall off the top of my head correctly) so why would Protestants who had been beaten into submission not gravitate toward the movement giving them more access to Latin. John Calvin didn't write his opus in Church Slavonic. If anything, I do remember reading that Calvinist converts within the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth found Christian Orthodox Ruthenians the greater of two evils over Latin Rite Catholics and the papacy feared that as such they'd target their missionary efforts on them which helped spur the creation of the Union of Brest to make sure there wasn't a mass movement of Christian Orthodox to Calvinism, so I'd imagine the defeated Protestants of the Hungarisn crown would be more adverse to ex-Orthodox Catholics with a similar liturgy and way of life to the Orthodox of the PLC they looked down on than the forward-thinking, erudite winners of the Counter-Reformation.

This story about the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church getting a boost from a mass conversion of Protestants has been so repeated over at least twenty four years on the Anglophone internet, and yet there's no book that explicitly confirms it. I think someone at least before 2001 just made it up out of thin air and it's been mindlessly repeated by well-meaning people for more than a quarter century. What a strange thing to come out of nowhere.

Hussites would have gotten the communion under both kinds and married priests they wanted

In beginning the present enquiry with this latter
group, one must first cite a report by Bishop Mánuel
Mihály Olsavszky from 1759.27 Bishop Olsavszky
compiled the report upon instructions from the
Congregation Propaganda Fide in Rome, actually on the basis of a highly detailed questionnaire
(consisting of as many as seventy items), dispatched
by the Dicastery. Question 67 concerned changes
in the situation of the flock entrusted to the Hierarch’s care over the preceding twenty years: Had it
improved or had it deteriorated instead? Bishop
Olsavszky started his self-confident response by
pointing out that, in the previous two decades, development among the Greek Catholics had been so
substantial that if his predecessors in the episcopacy
were to come to life again, they would not have
recognised their Church. As the engine of development, he identified the Mukachevo school founded
by him, where the clergy received thorough training and education. The related results were visible
in the life of the clergy, with a positive effect on
27 The report was published by: Lacko, 1959, 72–82. Cited in: Patacsi, 1962, 285–286.
28 Kónya, 2015.
the morals and religious practice of the faithful as
well. Therefore – as Olsavszky wrote – more and
more Lutherans, Calvinists and even Jews converted
to the Greek Catholic religion. He also saw it as
an unmistakable sign of development that stone
churches were built in so many villages to replace
the old wooden churches. This change was obviously justified by the growing size of congregations.
This section of Bishop Olsavszky’s report is of
particular relevance to the present investigation.
Increase in the size of the Greek Catholic community was a common phenomenon in the period
under analysis thanks to natural population growth
and continuous waves of settlement. This was compounded by the processes described by Bishop Olsavszky, i.e. Lutherans, Calvinists and Jews joining
the Greek Catholic Church. Although the Bishop
does not name ethnic groups himself, it is clear that
Lutherans and Calvinists are to be understood as
Slovaks and Hungarians.
The conversion of Hungarian Calvinists to the
Greek Catholic faith has recently been investigated
by Péter Kónya.28 In his study, he examined the
demographic, ethnic and confessional characteristics of nearly half a hundred settlements in the
South-Zemplén Region by analysing the data content of various 18th-century censuses. As, owing to
the battles of the Ottoman period, the struggles
of Rákóczi’s War of Independence, as well as the
ensuing epidemics, the region sustained considerable losses of human lives, it became a target area
for north-south migration. Concerning relations
between the resettled Greek Catholic Rusyn population and the local Calvinist Hungarian community – having processed the relevant data – Péter
Kónya concludes that Greek Catholics actively
participated in the re-Catholicising processes of
the region. As a consequence, numerous Calvinist
Hungarian families became Greek Catholic as part
of the waves of re-Catholicisation beginning from
the 1670s, as well as gathering new momentum
after Rákóczi’s War of Independence. He notes that
this phenomenon was well known even prior to the
creation of the Greek Catholic Church as contem-porary sources testify that Calvinists converting to

the Orthodox faith – due to marriage or conflicts
within congregations – was no rare occurrence. In
his final conclusion, he emphasises that, after his
investigations, the position that the ancestors of
Hungarian Greek Catholics were exclusively Magyarised Rusyns – a view that used to be prevalent in
relation to this region as well – is no longer tenable.2

https://szentatanaz.synergyfox.app/public/4/studia/onallo_kotetek/ca_i_15_angol_kozos_nyomda_low.pdf

I meant to reply to this a lot sooner, sorry about that.

That's me satisfied. I'm happy to be wrong. I've been skimming that book and it's a great read.

Do you think any of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia are Uniates or are 100% of them Latin rite or Protestant?

If you have any considerable number of people, you're not likely to get 100% of anything. I'm not interested enough to go look at census data myself, but I found this source that summarizes the desired info (Table 4): https://bgazrt.hu/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/5.Majo_jav.pdf

About 2% of Hungarian Slovaks would appear to by Byzantine, and the percentage would appear to be increasing. The largest in the table is 2.1%, back in 1930 (the earliest census included), so it is possible that there was a more significant number >100 years ago.