Georgian Byzantine-Rite Catholics

Georgian Byzantine Rite Catholics, or members of the Georgian Greek Catholic Church, are

liturgical language of the Georgian Orthodox Church

History

During the 19th century, when almost all Georgian Catholics were of the Roman or Armenian Rites, many wished to attend the Byzantine Rite in Old Georgian, as is traditional in the Georgian Orthodox Church.

The

Transcaucasia

.

In 1861, in

Servites of the Immaculate Conception, for both for male and female monastics. They served Georgian Greek Catholics living in the Ottoman Empire and at Montauban, France

.

Only after

Tsar Nicholas II grudgingly granted religious toleration during the Russian Revolution of 1905

did Catholics in Georgia feel able to adopt the Byzantine Rite.

In the brief period of Georgian independence between 1918 and 1921, some influential Georgian Orthodox expressed an interest in union with the Holy See, and an envoy was sent from Rome in 1919 to examine the situation. As a result of the onset of civil war and Soviet occupation, this came to nothing.

Some have treated Catholics within the

apostolic exarchate specifically for Georgian Greek Catholics had been established.^[1]

In The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Union Empire from Lenin through Stalin, Father Christopher Zugger says that in the early 1920s nine missionaries of the

Servites of the Immaculate Conception in Constantinople, headed by Bishop Shio Batmanishvili, came to Georgia to further establish the Byzantine Rite there, and that by 1929 their faithful had grown to 8,000.^[2] Tragically, their mission came to an end with the arrests of Exarch Shio and his priests in 1928, their imprisonment at Solovki prison camp, and their subsequent murder by Joseph Stalin's NKVD at Sandarmokh^[3] in 1937.^[4] Fr. Zugger cites a 1936 report that, "the Byzantine Catholic Church of Georgia had two communities, served by a bishop and four priests, with 8,000 believers",^[5] figures very similar to what elsewhere he gives as the 1929 situation.^[2]

Fr. Zugger does not state that the Georgian Byzantine Catholics were ever formally established as an autonomous particular Church, and no mention of the erection of such a jurisdiction for Byzantine Georgian Catholics exists in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the official gazette of the Holy See.^[

Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches defines these Churches as under a hierarchy of their own and recognized as autonomous by the supreme authority of the Church.^[6]

These congregations are long extinct, although some of their members were still alive in the late 1950s. The building that housed the male congregation, in
Georgian Byzantine rite. This church, Notre-Dame de Lourdes, is still in service,^[7]
although in the hands of Italian Catholic priests, gravestones in Georgian can still be seen in its courtyard.
Until 1994, the annual publication Catholic Almanac used to list "Georgian" among the Byzantine Rites or autonomous particular Churches. This was abandoned in 1995.
The largest community of Georgian Greek Catholics is in
sui juris
church.