Since the unanimous acceptance of the
Union of Uzhhorod on the territory that includes present day eastern
Slovakia in 1646, the history of the Slovak Greek Catholic Church was intertwined with that of the
Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church for a period of several centuries. At the end of
World War I, most Greek Catholic Ruthenians and Slovaks were included within the territory of
Czechoslovakia, including two
eparchies,
Prešov and
Mukačevo. The eparchy of Prešov, created on September 22, 1818, was removed in 1937 from the jurisdiction of the
Hungarian primate and subjected directly to the
Holy See, while the 21 parishes of the eparchy of Prešov that were in Hungary were formed into the
new exarchate of
Miskolc. After
World War II, the eparchy of Mukačevo in
Transcarpathia was annexed by the
Soviet Union, thus the eparchy of Prešov included all the Greek Catholics that remained in Czechoslovakia. After
communists seized the country in April 1950, a "synod" was convoked at Prešov, at which five priests and a number of laymen signed a document declaring that the union with Rome was disbanded and asking to be received into a jurisdiction of the
Moscow Patriarchate in the Orthodox Church of Czechoslovakia. Greek Catholic bishop Blessed
Pavel Petro Gojdič of Prešov along with his auxiliary, Blessed
Basil Hopko, were imprisoned and bishop
Gojdič died in prison in 1960. During the
Prague Spring in 1968, the former Greek Catholic parishes were allowed to restore communion with Rome. Of the 292 parishes involved, 205 voted in favor. This was one of the few reforms by
Dubček that survived the Soviet invasion the same year. However, most of their church buildings remained in the hands of Orthodox Church. After communism was overthrown in the 1989
Velvet Revolution, Church property was gradually returned to the Slovak Greek Catholic Church. This process was almost completed by 1993, the year after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the
Czech Republic and
Slovakia. For Greek Catholics in the Czech Republic, a separate
Apostolic Vicariate was created, elevated in 1996 to an
exarchate thus forming the
Apostolic Exarchate in the Czech Republic (now considered part of
Ruthenian Catholic Church); the 2007
Annuario Pontificio indicated that it had by then grown to having 177,704 faithful, 37 priests and 25 parishes. In Slovakia itself,
Pope John Paul II created an
Apostolic Exarchate of
Košice in 1997.
Pope Benedict XVI raised this to the level of an
Eparchy on January 30, 2008 and at the same time erected the new Byzantine-rite
Eparchy of Bratislava. He also raised Prešov to the level of a metropolitan see, constituting the Slovak Greek Catholic Church as a
sui iuris metropolitan Church. ==Structure==