Rites
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The Catholic Church
The liturgical traditions of the one Catholic Church — the Latin (Roman) Rite and the Eastern Catholic rites — each with its own history.
Slovak Greek Catholics descend from the Union of Uzhhorod (1646). Pope Pius VII erected the Eparchy of Prešov for them in 1818. In 1950 the communist regime abolished the Church by decree, imprisoned Blessed Bishop Pavel Peter Gojdič — who died in prison in 1960 — and forced its parishes into the Orthodox Church; it was legalised again in 1968. In 2008 Pope Benedict XVI raised it to a metropolitan Church sui iuris, with the Archeparchy of Prešov and the Eparchies of Košice and Bratislava.
Syriac Christians of the Antiochene tradition sought reunion with Rome repeatedly from the later Middle Ages, and a stable Catholic patriarchal line was secured with Ignatius Michael III Jarweh, elected in 1782 and confirmed by the Holy See. The Church suffered terribly in the massacres of Syriac Christians during the First World War, and again in our own time through the wars in Iraq and Syria, which drove many of its faithful from the plain of Nineveh and from Aleppo into exile.
The Syro-Malabar Church of Kerala, India, traces its origins to the evangelization attributed to Saint Thomas the Apostle. It follows the East Syriac tradition and is one of the largest Eastern Catholic Churches.
The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church of India entered into full communion with Rome in 1930 under the leadership of Mar Ivanios. It preserves the West Syriac (Antiochene) liturgical tradition.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the largest Eastern Catholic Church, follows the Byzantine tradition received from Constantinople. Its communion with Rome was renewed at the Union of Brest (1596). It endured severe persecution under Soviet rule.
The West Syriac tradition is the liturgy of Antioch, the city where the disciples were first called Christians. Shaped in the Syriac-speaking world of Syria and Mesopotamia, it was carried by monks and poets — above all Saint Ephrem, whose hymns still furnish its chants — and it reached India in the modern period through the Syro-Malankara Church. Three Catholic Churches sui iuris live this patrimony today: the Maronite, the Syriac and the Syro-Malankara.
After the Second Vatican Council called for the liturgy to be adapted to the genius of peoples, the bishops of what was then Zaire worked for two decades on an African expression of the Roman Mass. The Roman Missal for the Dioceses of Zaire was approved by the Holy See in 1988 and remains the one inculturated use of the Roman Rite approved for a whole region since the Council. Pope Francis celebrated it in Saint Peter's Basilica in 2019 with the Congolese community of Rome, and again during his visit to Kinshasa in 2023.