More on the "Carpatho-Russians"

This ethnic group, not well known to many in the U.S., was commented on earlier in this blog. Recently the blogger ran across some wonderful images and books about the heartland of these people, Carpathian Ruthenia. This was in the World Digital Library, an online cooperative venture of a number of national and other libraries. In the European section there is a book from the National Parliamentary Library of Ukraine showing rare images of the villages, churches and people in this region which was the center of this ethnic group.

As noted in the records, this mountainous region was largely in the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire before WWI, but afterwards some of it became part of Czechoslovakia. some fell to Poland, with most of it becoming what is today the Zakarpattia Oblast in western Ukraine. The natives were a rural peasant people who spoke a Slavic dialect similar to Ukrainian with Polish influences. Shown here is a group of women of the region.

Religiously they were predominantly what is referred to as either "Eastern Catholics" or "Uniates." Their story is significant not only to our parish but to the Orthodox Church of America as well, since after the followers of this church came to America many of them became part of the former "Metropolia," which later became the OCA. What follows is an attempt to relate briefly a very complicated and often contentious story!

Essentially what happened is that in the European borderlands between West and East there was a tremendous amount of political and religious rivalry between Roman Catholic and Easter Orthodox princes and powers. The Easter Catholics or Uniates are an outcome of this rivalry. They are a church which largely follows an Orthodox style worship and tradition, but recognize the primacy and authority of the Pope, rather than the collegial body of Orthodox metropolitans and patriarchs. So for example their priest can marry, as in Orthodoxy, but they still accept the authority of Rome. At left is one of their churches.

When these people came to the U.S. and brought their church with them, there was a good deal of confusion. Roman Catholic leaders here were not familiar with their situation, and unsympathetic to it in many cases, finding the marriage of priests mentioned above unacceptable, and so on. A leader of this people, Father Alexis Toth, a Uniate priest, struggled with these issues and in the end led many to reunion with the then main Orthodox body in the U.S., the Metropolia mission of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Carpatho-Russian Uniates who returned to Orthodoxy form an important part of the history of today's Orthodox Church in America.