One Catholic faith, lived in the Christian East

The Ruthenian Church

From Carpathian Rus’ to the United States

“Ruthenian” was used by the Catholic Church for Byzantine Catholics of Eastern Europe, especially those once living under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Their ancestral homeland—called Carpathian Rus’, Transcarpathia, Carpatho-Ruthenia, Carpatho-Russia, or Carpatho-Ukraine—lies across today’s eastern Slovakia, southwest Ukraine, northeast Hungary, and northwest Romania. The Carpatho-Rusins received Christianity from the Byzantine Empire.

In 863, the Byzantine Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius, the Apostles to the Slavs, brought Christianity and a new Slavonic alphabet to Greater Moravia. Their followers moved east and eventually evangelized the Ruthenian people.

Many Ruthenian faithful came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seeking work and Greek Catholic parishes. In 1924, the Holy See established the first Greek Catholic exarchate in the United States for Carpatho-Rusyn, Hungarian, Slovak, and Croatian faithful, with Bishop Basil Takach as its first bishop. It became an eparchy in 1963; the Pittsburgh see became an archeparchy in 1969.