Small numbers of Russians sought communion with Rome while keeping the Byzantine liturgy of their homeland untouched. In 1917 an apostolic exarchate was erected for them, with Blessed Leonid Feodorov as exarch; he was imprisoned by the Soviet authorities and died in 1935. A second exarchate was established at Harbin in Manchuria in 1928 for Russians in exile. Both remain vacant, and the faithful today are few and widely dispersed.

Without a hierarch of its own, the Church's parishes are ordinarily entrusted to the care of the local Latin bishops. The Divine Liturgy is celebrated in Church Slavonic according to the Russian recension of the Byzantine tradition.

A very small Byzantine-rite Church sui iuris of Russian Catholics, whose two apostolic exarchates have long remained vacant.

byzantine

Russia and the Russian diaspora

church_sui_iuris

church_sui_iuris

A very small, scattered community of a few thousand faithful