A movement of Bulgarian Christians toward communion with Rome came to a head in 1861, when Pope Pius IX himself ordained the archimandrite Joseph Sokolski a bishop for them in Rome. The community survived war, population exchanges and forty years of communist rule; an apostolic exarchate governed it from Sofia through the twentieth century, and in 2019 Pope Francis raised that exarchate to the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII of Sofia.

The Church is governed by an eparchial bishop in Sofia and celebrates the Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine tradition in Church Slavonic and Bulgarian. Its history is closely bound to the Congregation of the Assumption and to the schools that served Bulgarian Catholics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A Byzantine-rite Church sui iuris in Bulgaria, dating from the union of 1861 and governed since 2019 by the Eparchy of Saint John XXIII of Sofia.

byzantine

Bulgaria, with its see at Sofia

church_sui_iuris

church_sui_iuris

Roughly ten thousand faithful