Eastern Catholic Studies and Texts – serie

The Second Vatican Council urged Eastern Catholics to cultivate their share of divine revelation for the benefit of the entire Catholic Church. Yet, more than 50 years later, the Eastern Catholic Churches frequently remain on the margins, both in the theological academy and in the life of the Church more broadly. In an effort to remedy this situation, at least in part, this volume offers a scholarly reflection on the unique patrimony of the Eastern Catholic Churches, divided according to the categories of Liturgy, Theology, Spirituality, Discipline, and Culture. In so doing, it both follows the categories used to define a Church sui iuris in the Code of Canon Law for the Eastern Churches, and builds on the legacy of the Rev. Peter Galadza, to whom the volume is dedicated.On one hand, the volume and its essays are intentionally introductory, revealing the worlds of Eastern Catholicism and the variety of theological approaches that take place there. At the same time, however, several of the essays in this volume relate the history and current reality of Eastern Catholicism to the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, yet without ignoring how frequently Eastern Catholics live, worship, and theologize without self-conscious regard for their unique ecclesial situation. Indeed, these authors show, Eastern Catholic theology can be unself-consciously grounded in the patristic tradition, and Eastern Catholics can simply "do" theology, without worrying about ecclesial politics. Readers will thus find here the best of both worlds: both an introduction to the unique and frequently ignored patrimony of the Eastern Catholic Churches, and a series of essays that avoids the all-to-common pitfall of reducing these traditions to a parody of other Churches, Eastern or Western. Instead, by engaging with the sources of the Christian tradition – as Eastern Catholics, yes, but first and foremost as Christians – the authors reveal how much their tradition can offer the Catholic Church as a whole.

A Witness of the Silent Church is a first-hand personal witness to the life of one of the outstanding religious leaders in the Catholic Church and the confessor of faith. It presents the autobiography of Cardinal Josyf Slipyj (1892-1984), who served as a head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the period of the Soviet regime (1944-1984) and led his Church through the difficult period of catacombs and persecutions.This memoir traces the trajectory and main events of Slipyj’s life and sheds light on his personality and inner world of his thoughts and intentions. They cover his childhood and formation period, his pastoral and scholarly ministry in the Church, as well as his suffering in prisons, camps, and exile until his liberation in 1963. Slipyj’s life story appears as a backdrop where the entire epoch unfolds. The reader can observe the religious life of Western Ukraine against the background of the complex religious, political and social developments of the twentieth century, the martyrology and underground activity of the Greek Catholics during the period of Church persecution, the dire fate of the clergy, faithful, and cultural and political leaders in the Soviet time.A Witness of the Silent Church is supplied with extensive commentaries and annotations that provide important insights into the religious life of Ukraine of this period. The introduction to Slipyj’s autobiography presents the complicated textual history of the manuscript, its historical value and prepares a reader for the historically-contextualized reading of these memoirs. Slipyj’s autobiography is supplemented with the two studies, which complete Slipyj’s unfinished narrative, elucidating the circumstances of Slipyj’s release from the Gulag and his activity in Rome during the last twenty years of his life (1963-1984) as well as the events following his death: such as Slipyj’s rehabilitation and the glorious return of his relics to the homeland. The book includes appendices with valuable historical documents related to the activity of Cardinal Josyf Slipyj as a witness of the silent Church of the martyrs.This book is intended for scholars, church historians, and all readers interested in the history of Catholic Church, Christian testimony of faith and the biographies of twentieth-century martyrs and confessors.

Veteran authors Francisca Băltăceanu and Monica Broşteanu render extensive archival research into a readable, stand-alone volume about seven key figures in the outlawed Romanian Greek Catholic Church. Prefaced by the Greek Catholic bishop of Bucharest, the book synthesizes indispensable background information for reading the story of these twentieth-century church leaders from Transylvania where in 1700 an agreement of union was reached between the Romanian Orthodox leadership and the Catholic Church in Rome, forming the Romanian Church United to Rome, Greek Catholic.In 1948 the Soviet-imposed government in Romania determined that the Romanian Greek Catholic Church no longer existed and detained its bishops: Vasile Aftenie, Valeriu Traian Frenţiu, Ioan Suciu, Ioan Bălan, Alexandru Rusu, and Iuliu Hossu. At the same time, it detained numerous priests including Tit Liviu Chinezu who was secretly consecrated bishop at the request of the papal nuncio. Witnesses to Beatitude traces the bishops’ various origins and the extensive pressures put on them to cut their ties with the Vatican. For creatively resisting these pressures the seven men were put in the infamous Sighet prison and under house arrest where in 1969 Iuliu Hossu, the last to survive, was made a cardinal in pectore by Pope Paul VI.The book garnered a large bipartisan Catholic and Orthodox readership in Romania where it was a bestseller at the 2019 Bookfest. Drawing from the casefile submitted to the Holy See to recognize the martyrdom of the seven bishops who were beatified in June 2019, the book documents how the Communist government conducted a fierce campaign to ban the Greek Catholic Church and made the Orthodox leadership look responsible. The book includes oral testimonies suggesting the life force and humor that brought the bishops through the storm. It also contains the full bibliography of the casefile and an introduction and updated bibliography for English-language readers.