Latin Archdiocese of Athens

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According to Catholic-Hierarchy.org (catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dathe.html) the Latin Archdiocese of Athens, in Orthodox Greece, jumped from 30 000 faithful to 100 000 faithful in one year. I somehow doubt 70 000 Orthodox were received into the Latin Rite of the Church over such a short period of time. Any thoughts?

(Also, why would the vast majority of Catholics in Greece be Latin? If they are living in a predominantly Orthodox land, wouldn’t it be easier to worship as Catholics in the Byzantine rite?)
 
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twf:
According to Catholic-Hierarchy.org (catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dathe.html) the Latin Archdiocese of Athens, in Orthodox Greece, jumped from 30 000 faithful to 100 000 faithful in one year. I somehow doubt 70 000 Orthodox were received into the Latin Rite of the Church over such a short period of time. Any thoughts?

(Also, why would the vast majority of Catholics in Greece be Latin? If they are living in a predominantly Orthodox land, wouldn’t it be easier to worship as Catholics in the Byzantine rite?)
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The number probably reflects a wave of immigrants who have started to attend the already existing churches. Given the large circulation of immigrants in Eastern Europe in the last 15 years, a number of a few tens of thousands is not that high (the larger EU states like Germany, Italy, France and United Kingdom have had many hundreds of thousands of new arrivals!)

The Latin Catholics in Greece have a longer history (there are quite a few communities, including sizeable parts of the population of islands like Syros), sometimes dating back to the Venetian rule in the Aegean sea.

Byzantine Catholics, on the other hand, are more recent, very few (they numbered but 2,000 when their number was swelled up by Ukrainian immigrants from the UGCC), some of them former Orthodox, and very despised in a country that has always taken Uniatism with the utmost severity.
 
And because of this despised view of unitaism there are virtually no Greek Catholic or Russian Catholics in Greece or Russia the overwhelming majority of catholics are latin rite catholics who are immigrants in origin of course some of the immigrant communities are hundreds of hundreds of years old and have religious ties that are quite old in the country and of course many are new communities as is the case with many in Greece it appears. This probably will be more common as the globalization of the econonmy has people moving around for vocation reasons.
 
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Wisdom:
And because of this despised view of unitaism there are virtually no Greek Catholic or Russian Catholics in Greece or Russia
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Keep in mind that the Russian Greek-Catholic Church is barely more than a century old. It was only in 1896 that Father Nicholas Tolstoy, of blessed memory, was received into communion with Rome and incardinated into the Melkite Patriarchate. He was really the progenitor of what would become the Russian Greek-Catholic Church sui iuris. What few Catholics there were in Russia prior to that time were of the Latin Rite and Church.

Joe
 
Joe Monahan:
into the Melkite Patriarchate.
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It strikes me that we have not yet realised the ramifications of the Pope divesting himself of his patriarchal status. Within the Catholic communion there are 23 Churches and 22 of them are Patriarchates (or potential Patriarchates.) But since last week one is no longer a Patriarchate. What is Rome now? And what is its relationship to all the Patriarchates?

Could the extinction of the Roman Patriarchate be connected with the rather pushy Melchite Patriarch and his pretence of being on a patriarchal par with the Pope? Now it is some thing he simply cannot claim. There simply is no Patriarch in Rome anymore. How very odd!
 
Joe Monahan:
into the Melkite Patriarchate.
Click to expand...
It strikes me that we have not yet realised the ramifications of the Pope divesting himself of his patriarchal status. Within the Catholic communion there are 23 Churches and 22 of them are Patriarchates (or potential Patriarchates.) But since last week one is no longer a Patriarchate. What is Rome now? And what is its relationship to all the Patriarchates?

Could the extinction of the Roman Patriarchate be connected with the rather pushy Melchite Patriarch and his pretence of being on a patriarchal par with the Pope? Now it is something he simply cannot claim. There simply is no Patriarch in Rome anymore. How very odd!
 
Fr. Ambrose:

We do not have a Patriarch (of the West) but we still have a Pope, the Supreme Pontiff of the universal Catholic Church!😉
 
30,000 to 100,000 in 53 years surprising? It could have been achieved just by reproduction, if the original number had the insight, and the desire, to do so.

The jump from 30,000 in 2001 and 2002 to 100,000 in 2003 and 2004 is, indeed, surprising! (Could be that no statistical information was available or kept religiously, pun intended!)

But most of the addition is from immigrants and migrant workers in the EU, as Fr. Ambrogio rightly observed. The influx of immigrants is true to all of Europe from East to West, and from Asia and Africa.

A good number of those immigrant Roman Catholics in Athens could be from the Philippines.
 
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