The Greek Byzantine Catholic Church is a particular Church within the Roman Catholic Church and uses the Byzantine liturgical rite in the Greek language. Its membership includes inhabitants of Greece and Turkey.

History

Although, after the failure of the attempts by the Council of Lyons in 1274 and by the Council of Florence in 1439 to repair the breach of the East-West Schism between Greek and Latin Christians, many individual Greeks, then under Ottoman rule, embraced Catholicism, it was not until the 1880s that a church specifically for Greek Catholics who followed the Byzantine Rite was built in the village of Malgara in Thrace. Before the end of the nineteenth century two more such churches were built, one in Constantinople, the other in Kadiköy, Turkey.

Much more numerous were the Greek Catholics of Latin Rite, who formed the majority of the population in some Aegean islands. To a large extent these Catholics were fully Hellenized descendants of Venetians, Genoese and Amalfitans who had settled in Greece for trading and other reasons.

In 1907, Father Isaias Papadopoulos, the priest who had built the church in Thrace, was appointed vicar general for the Greek Catholics within the apostolic

As a result of the conflict between Greece and Turkey after the First World War, the Greek Catholics of Malgara and of the neighbouring village of Daudeli moved to Yannitsa in Macedonia, and many of those who lived in Constantinople emigrated to Athens, among them the bishop who had succeeded to the position of Exarch and the religious institute of the Sisters of the Pammakaristos, founded in 1920.

In 1932 the territory of the Exarchate for Byzantine-Rite Greek Catholics was limited to that of the Greek state, and a separate Exarchate of İstanbul/Constantinople was established for those resident in Turkey. Due to continued emigration, the Catholics of the latter exarchate have become reduced to extremely few. The Catholics of the exarchate for Greece, who were never very numerous, are now outnumbered by the Ukrainian Catholic immigrants in its care, who are assisted also by priests and religious sisters from Ukraine.

Sources

• Oriente Cattolico (Vatican City: The Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Churches, 1974)
• Annuario Pontificio.