- Byzantine Catholics
- The Byzantine Catholics are those who correspond to the Orthodox. They all use the same (Byzantine) Rite; but they are not all organized as one body. They form seven groups:
the Melkites in Syria and Egypt (about 110,000), under a Patriarch of Antioch who administers, and bears the titles of, Alexandria and Jerusalem too. They have eleven dioceses and use Arabic liturgically with fragments Greek, though any of their priests may (and some do) celebrate entirely in Greek. The old name “Melkite”, which meant originally one who accepted the decrees of Chalcedon (and the imperial laws), as against the Jacobites and Copts, is now used only for these Catholics.
There are a few hundred Catholics of this Rite in Greece and Turkey in Europe. They use Greek liturgically and depend on Latin delegates at Constantinople and Athens.
One Georgian congregation of Constantinople (last remnant of the old Georgian Church destroyed by Russia), who use their own language and obey the Latin Delegate.
The Ruthenians, of whom there are nearly four millions in Austria-Hungary and hidden still in corners of Russia. They use Old Slavonic.
The Bulgarian Catholics (about 13,000), under two vicars Apostolic, who also use old Slavonic.
Rumanian Catholics (about a million and a half) in Rumania, but chiefly in Transylvania. They have bishops and use their own language in the liturgy.
The Italo-Greeks (about 50,000), a remnant of the old Church of Greater Greece. They are scattered about Calabria and Sicily, have a famous monastery near Rome (Grotta-ferrata) and colonies at Leghorn, Malta, Algiers, Marseilles, and Corsica, besides a church (St-Julien le Pauvre) at Paris. They use Greek liturgically but, living as they do surrounded by Latins, they have considerably latinized their rites.
This completes the list of Byzantine Catholics, of whom it may be said that the chief want is organization among themselves. There has often been talk of restoring a Catholic (Melkite) Patriarch of Constantinople. It was said that Pope Leo XIII intended to arrange this before he died. If such a revival ever is made, the patriarch would have jurisdiction, or at least a primacy, over all Catholics of his Rite; in this way the scattered unities of Melkites in Syria, Ruthenians in Hungary, Italo-Greeks in Sicily, and so on, would be linked together as are all other Eastern Catholic Churches.
- Chaldean Catholics
The Chaldees are Eastern Catholics converted from Nestorianism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a complicated series of quarrels and schisms among the Nestorians led to not very stable unions of first one and then another party with the Holy See. Since that time there has always been a Catholic patriarch of the Chaldees, though several times the person so appointed fell away into schism again and had to be replaced by another. The Chaldees are said now to number about 70,000 souls (Silbernagl, op. cit., 354; but Werner, “Orbis Terr. Cath.”, 166, gives the number as 33,000). Their primate lives at Mosul, having the title of Patriarch of Babylon. Under him are two archbishoprics and ten other sees. There are monasteries whose arrangements are very similar to those of the Nestorians. The liturgical books (in Syriac, slightly revised from the Nestorian ones) are printed by the Dominicans at Mosul. Most of their canon law depends on the Bull of Pius IX, “Reversurus” (12 July, 1867), published for the Armenians and extended to the Chaldees by another Bull, “Cum ecclesiastica” (31 Aug., 1869). They have some students at the Propaganda College in Rome.
