in the
East Village of
Manhattan,
New York City, designed by
James Renwick Jr. and
W. H. Russell in 1883 as a chapel for
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery but now part of the ACROD. At the end of the nineteenth century, many
East Slavs immigrated to North America. They were mostly
Christians, some of them belonging to
Eastern Orthodoxy, while others were
Eastern Catholics of the
Byzantine Rite. In Catholic terminology, East-Slavic form of the Byzantine Rite was known as the
Ruthenian Rite, and thus the same
Ruthenian designation was applied to East Slavs of that rite. At that time, there were no Eastern Catholic jurisdictions in North America, and thus the first Eastern Catholic parishes were formed under jurisdiction of local Catholic bishops of the
Latin Church. The
Roman Catholic hierarchs, mostly Irish and Polish, however, did not readily welcome Eastern Catholics of the Ruthenian Rite, fearing the "
scandal" that the presence of married priests would have on their own flock. Treatment of the Eastern Catholics of the
Byzantine Rite by the bishops of the predominant
Latin Rite Catholics, especially regarding a married priesthood and the form of the
Divine Liturgy or
Mass, led some of them out of Catholicism and into the
Eastern Orthodox Church. A particularly strident opponent of non-Latin practices was
John Ireland the
Archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota from 1888 to 1918, who refused to permit Eastern Catholic clergy to function in his archdiocese. The diocese was founded in 1938 when a group of 37
Ruthenian Eastern Catholic parishes, under the leadership of Fr. Orestes Chornock, were received into the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The year before, this group had officially renounced the
Unia with the
Holy See, primarily in protest over the
Liturgical Latinisation occurring in their church life. A particularly divisive issue was the 1929 papal decree
Cum data fuerit issued by
Pope Pius XI which mandated that Eastern Rite clergy in the US were to be celibate. This move actually marked the second
North American group of Ruthenian-Rite Catholic parishes to move to Eastern Orthodoxy. The first had been led by
Saint Alexis Toth of Wilkes-Barre into the jurisdiction of the
Russian Metropolia in the 1890s. Notably, this second large-scale conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy by Ruthenian-Rite Catholics was directed toward
Constantinople rather than to the Russian presence in North America. This was primarily motivated out of concerns for preservation of a specific identity, since many among Ruthenian-Rite Catholics self-identified as
Rusyns, and wanted to keep their distinctive identity, thus opposing
Russification, which had occurred with the previous move. As such, rather than being absorbed into the body of Russian churches, and so being compelled to adopt
Muscovite traditions, the ACROD was permitted by Constantinople to keep its distinctive Rusyn practices. Thus, the
hymnography in the typical Ruthenian
Prostopinije-chant and
liturgical forms, including the particular form of
Old Church Slavonic used in the
divine services, were preserved, while certain Latin Rite practices, such as the addition of the
Filioque clause to the
Nicene Creed, were removed. ==Organization==