Word: ruthenian
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Except for such compelling reasons as scandal, heresy or outright incompetence, a Roman Catholic bishop is almost never separated from his see. For the past seven months, however, the Most Rev. Nicholas T. Elko, Ruthenian-rite bishop of Pittsburgh, has been in Rome, barred by his church superiors from returning to his diocese. The case of Bishop Elko, who describes his situation as "exile," casts fascinating light on Catholicism's current internal stresses-and on the problems of its little-known Eastern-rite churches...
...Ruthenian rite is one of 17 semi-autonomous branches of Catholicism that acknowledge the Pope as head of the church but have their own non-Latin customs and liturgies. Ruthenian Catholics, for example, use a Byzantine liturgy identical to that followed by Eastern Orthodox Christians who are not in union with Rome, and which is traditionally celebrated in Hungarian, Greek or Old Slavonic. In the U.S., there are about 600,000 Eastern-rite Catholics. For many of them, their church is a God-given way of maintaining nostalgic ties with their homelands in Eastern Europe and Russia. But their peculiar...
Bricks & Mortar. One of two Ruthenian bishops in the U.S., Elko for twelve years has been the spiritual leader of 220,000 souls in 120 scattered parishes from Pittsburgh to Alaska. The first American-born priest ever to become a Ruthenian prelate, Elko was in many respects a typical U.S. bishop: a blunt, tough, brick-and-mortar administrator who built 93 new churches and schools for his diocese. Nonetheless, his no-nonsense ways managed to offend both liberals and conservatives in his far-flung...
Elko alienated Ruthenian traditionalists by requesting that priests also use English in the liturgy. Although Byzantine churches traditionally adopt the language of their native country, many conservatives in his diocese indignantly protested the holding of services in English as well as in European tongues. The bishop likewise alienated conservatives by removing the iconostasis, or screen, which separates the altar from the faithful in Oriental churches, and by shortening Easter services from 4½ to 3½ hours. Elko's firm administrative methods caused further complaint; diocesan clergy accused him of being a ruthless autocrat, who was averse to discussing...
...Ruthenian persecution was important in itself, and also as an example of Stalin's use of the Orthodox Church to further Communism's Pan-Slavic program in southeastern Europe. But the Pope's encyclical highlighted an even more important global aspect of the Stalin-Alexei alliance, which had recently reached imperiously into the U.S. Last month the Russian Orthodox hierarchy of the U.S. and Canada, who cut loose from Moscow in 1917, met in Chicago. They heard the Patriarch Alexei's delegate demand submission to Moscow. In pious language, they told him to peddle his Moscovite...