RORATE CÆLI: Ordinations – I: a new Russian Greek Catholic priest
There are more photographs on Fides et Ratio, showing a Latinisation – prostration of the ordinand, we are told, during the Litany of the Saints. Even more photographs on the website of the (Latin) Catholic Diocese of the Transfiguration in Siberia, in whose Cathedral in Novosibirsk the ordination took place, because its bishop is the ordinariate for Byzantine Catholics in Russia, since 2004.
Although the Russian Catholic Church is a Catholic Church sui iuris and was recognised in some sense towards the end of the Tsardom, it is not recognised or acceptable to the Russian Orthodox Church. From the beginning of the Communist period Byzantine Catholic populations (including Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians who at the time celebrated the Byzantine rite, like the Russian Orthodox, in Slavonic, and not in vernacular tongues) from the western areas of what became the Soviet Union were deported to Siberia for enforced labout programmes. An account of their plight, and explaining thus why Siberia is now a home to Russian Catholicism, is in The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin Through Stalin, by Christopher Lawrence Zugger (Syracuse University Press, 2001).
The Moscow Patriarchate objected to the establishment of Latin Catholic non-territorial vicariates and then dioceses for its faithful across Russia under Pope John Paul II, and this contributed to its withdrawal for years from the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, on the grounds that they contravened the principle of territorial integrity of “local” churches. The dioceses in the territory of other patriarchates and in the territory of the Latin West that Moscow itself has set up are not the same, it claims, as they are not “ordinary” or territorially defined, but exist purely for the pastoral care of the Russian diaspora. It is difficult to see how the Catholic dioceses, Latin and Byzantine alike, are not other than to serve Catholic faithful dispersed from elsewhere. In so far as they attract people to the Catholic Church, they are no different in effect from Russian churches in the West, which tends not controversial.
While it could be wished otherwise for the sake of the Byzantine Catholic faithful in the Russian Federation, it is judged imprudent in the present phase of dialogue and rapprochement to disturb such progress as is being made by establishing a circumscription for them under the provisions of a Russian Catholic Church sui iuris.