Wednesday, July 08, 2015

Sui Juris Churches Index

The full index for all the posts on sui juris churches follows. The primary ordering principles were just time and ignorance, so nothing much should be made of the order. I knew some of them -- Armenian, Chaldean, Bulgarian, and Latin -- would have to be put off to a point when I had a bit more time than I had in Spring term, due to the complexity of their history and the subsequent difficulty of condensing it to a brief summary. Some of them I already knew quite a bit about, like the Maronite, some I knew a little, but only a little about, and others, like the Slovak, Albanian, and Croatian, I knew nothing whatsoever about before starting the project, thus requiring more research. I suppose I also tried to spread out the Byzantine Rite churches a bit; since they are more than half of the particular churches, I broke them up.

Going through them all was an interesting experience, and I learned quite a bit from it. It made very clear just how awful a thing twentieth-century Communism was; when you look at the history of the Eastern churches, you run into just terrible things, over and over again, that came about due to the Soviets or their satellite governments. Prior to the Soviet Union, the worst persecutors of Eastern Catholics were the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, especially the latter, but they had nothing on the Communists. And the Communists were not only terrible; they were very effective. It was particularly difficult to read up on what Communists did to Eastern Catholics in Belarus and Albania.

It was also interesting seeing the variation in how visible the churches are online; some of them are very active and visible on the internet, while others are not. Interestingly, the most popular post in the entire series, by far, was that for the Russian Catholic Church; small though the church is, it seems to have a very active social media and internet presence!

Introduction: Sui Juris Churches

I. The Italo-Albanian Catholic Church
II. The Syriac Maronite Church of Antioch
III. The Melkite Catholic Church
IV. The Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic
V. The Russian Greek Catholic Church
VI. The Coptic Catholic Church
VII. The Ruthenian Catholic Church
VIII. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
IX. The Belarusian Greek Catholic Church
X. The Church of Malabar Syrians
XI. The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church
XII. The Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia
XIII. The Albanian Byzantine Catholic Church
XIV. The Ethiopian Catholic Church
XV. The Eritrean Catholic Church
XVI. The Hungarian Greek Catholic Church
XVII. The Armenian Catholic Church
XVIII. The Greek Byzantine Catholic Church
XIX. The Syriac Catholic Church
XX. The Chaldean Catholic Church
XXI. The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church
XXII. The Byzantine Church of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro
XXIII. The Macedonian Greek Catholic Church
XXIV. The Latin Church

Appendices

I. Ordinariates for the Faithful of the Eastern Rite
II. Patriarchal and Major Archiepiscopal Cathedrals of the Catholic Church