Eastern Catholic Numbers

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Mine is - Ukrainian Catholics rock! 👍

I also understand there are Orthodox parishes in western Ukraine (that used to be Greek-Catholic prior to 1946) that have returned to the UGCC.

Don’t know if this has added to the increase.

The Romanian Catholics and Eastern Catholics who are often a tiny minority in a largely Orthodox country often find their numbers shrinking due to all kinds of social and political pressures.

The more ecumenical EC’s become toward Orthodoxy, also under the encouragement from Rome itself, the more likely that one will see Eastern Catholics becoming/returning to Orthodoxy, especially when they are a minority which is looked upon with suspicion by the surrounding religious environment.

Alex
 
dcointin said:
Here is a report of the total numbers of Eastern Catholics according to Church:

cnewa.org/source-images/Roberson-eastcath-statistics/eastcatholic-stat10.pdf

If my math is correct, it’s a total of 17,308,126.

The biggest changes were a large increase in Ukranian Catholics, and decrease in Romanian Catholics.

Any thoughts?
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Well the large growth in number of Ukrainian Catholics in Ukraine from O in 1990 is explicable by the fact that when the Soviet Union collapsed (1991), all those repressed Ukrainian Catholics in Ukraine whose church’s very existence was illegal and punishable under the Soviet Union came out of the catacombs. Until then, if they wished to join a Church, it had to be the Soviet-approved Russian Orthodox Church. Many went to this church in the absence of their own liquidated church but secretly still being Ukrainian Catholic. Church attendance in the Soviet Union, as Bohdan Bociurkiw pointed out, was actually the highest in the Ukrainian Catholic homeland of Halychyna, with sometimes priest and parishioners knowing they were really Ukrainian Catholics. (Others risked their lives by attending clandestine Ukrainian Catholic services). To this day I think the Russian Orthodox Church finds it problematic that the highest per-person church attendance of all the lands of the former Soviet Union is found in that part of western Ukraine where the Ukrainian Catholic Church was and is - Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, and the Mukachevo eparchy in Zakarpattia (the latter province being the ancestral homeland of those faithful on CAF who put Ruthenian in the upper-right hand corner and which church also appears on the chart and which rose to life again after the collapse of the Soviet Union and unimaginable suffering).

🙂

It is truly miraculous that after decades of death, torture, and repression, millions upon millions never lost their faith in their church.
 
KyivAndrew said:
Well the large growth in number of Ukrainian Catholics is explicable by the fact that when the Soviet Union collapsed, all those repressed Ukrainian Catholics in Ukraine whose church’s very existence was illegal and punishable under the Soviet Union came out of the catacombs. Until then, if they wished to join a Church, it had to be the Soviet-approved Russian Orthodox Church. Many went to this church in the absence of their own liquidated church but secretly still being Ukrainian Catholic. Church attendance in the Soviet Union, as Bohdan Bociurkiw pointed out, was actually the highest in the Ukrainian Catholic homeland of Halychyna, with sometimes priest and parishioners knowing they were really Ukrainian Catholics. (Others risked their lives by attending clandestine Ukrainian Catholic services). To this day I think the Russian Orthodox Church finds it problematic that the highest per-person church attendance of all the lands of the former Soviet Union is found in that part of western Ukraine where the Ukrainian Catholic Church was and is - Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, and the Mukacevo eparchy in Zakarpattia (the latter province being the ancestral homeland of those faithful on CAF who put Ruthenian in the upper-right hand corner and which church also appears on the chart and which rose to life again after the collapse of the Soviet Union and unimaginable suffering).

🙂

It is truly miraculous that after decades of death, torture, and repression, millions upon millions never lost their faith in their church.
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What happened to the Ruthenians in the United States? They seem to have suffered an incredible decline in members.
 
It looks like some estimates were corrected:

Ukrainian Greek Catholic:

A. Apostolic Exarchate of Great Britain
2009 50,000
2010 10,000

B. Apostolic Exarchate of Germany & Scandinavia (Munich)
2009 51,000
2010 30,320

Slovak Greek Catholic:
Eparchy of Bratislava, Slovakia

2009 484,046
2010 20,000

Byzantine USA
The US Byzantine Number did decrease to 98%. From 89764 to 88093.
 
Elene said:
What happened to the Ruthenians in the United States? They seem to have suffered an incredible decline in members.
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Changes in liturgy (of questionable value) both text and music.
Lack of vocations.
Lack of growth.
Lack of jobs in the Pierogi Belt.

Some are lost to Ukrainian parishes, many to Roman ones. Whether formal defection or not, it really hurts as the numbers are by parish enrollment in the US, not canonical enrollment.
 
Aramis said:
Changes in liturgy (of questionable value) both text and music.
Lack of vocations.
Lack of growth.
Lack of jobs in the Pierogi Belt.

Some are lost to Ukrainian parishes, many to Roman ones. Whether formal defection or not, it really hurts as the numbers are by parish enrollment in the US, not canonical enrollment.
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And consider what happens over time to an Eastern Catholic Parish due to marriage and relocation. When an Eastern Catholic marries a spouse in the Latin Church, they can observe the holy days and penitential seasons and Liturgy of the Latin Church, and raise the children in the Latin Church (if they agree). Due to the mobility of our American culture, and the lack even one Eastern Catholic Church in most cities, the Latin Church assimilates them. Also economic difficulty leads to smaller families.
 
Aramis said:
Changes in liturgy (of questionable value) both text and music.
Lack of vocations.
Lack of growth.
Lack of jobs in the Pierogi Belt.

Some are lost to Ukrainian parishes, many to Roman ones. Whether formal defection or not, it really hurts as the numbers are by parish enrollment in the US, not canonical enrollment.
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I’m sorry to hear that. I visited a Ruthenian parish once and the liturgy was magnificent.
 
Aramis said:
Changes in liturgy (of questionable value) both text and music.
Lack of vocations.
Lack of growth.
Lack of jobs in the Pierogi Belt.

Some are lost to Ukrainian parishes, many to Roman ones. Whether formal defection or not, it really hurts as the numbers are by parish enrollment in the US, not canonical enrollment.
Click to expand...
As I said on another forum where these stats were posted, forgive an obvious question, how many of the faithful are having children and if so at what age and how many? Front page of local paper last week “The U.S. birth rate has fallen to its lowest level in at least a century”. The numbers in Europe and most of our “homelands” have also been below “replacement rate” for years. In the US our recent immigrants are credited with keeping the country at replacement rate.

Lest folks think this is totally off topic it is not.

(I don’t see Orthodox around here typically having families larger than 2 children, ie below the replacement rate, nor protestants, nor Jews, except for some pockets of so-called conservatives.)
 
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