Roman Catholic Church in Greece

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The Roman Catholic Church in Greece sees its roots in the early Church and in the work of the Apostle Paul .

Believers

The Catholic Church in Greece ( Καθολική Εκκλησία της Ελλάδος ) is a relatively small church with partly diaspora character, which is far surpassed by the Orthodox Church . The Catholic Church consists of around 50,000 to 100,000 Greeks, which makes up around 0.5% to 1% of the native population. However, the Catholic Church in Greece (far above all the smaller ones and, in any case, only recently, Protestant churches or free churches and other groups or sects that emerged through missionary work from abroad) represents the second largest Christian denomination in the country and has been around since the high Middle Ages present in certain regions. The Cyclades , the Dodecanese , Crete and Corfu were (and are still partly today) centers of Catholicism in Greece and there were probably also some purely Catholic regions, such as B. the island of Syros , whose population was exclusively Catholic until around the middle of the 19th century (and the immigration of Orthodox Greeks from other areas associated with the Greek War of Independence ).

Most of the Catholics are spatially located in Athens today (approx. 30,000), but z. For example, there are also Catholic metropolitan areas in Syros (approx. 8,000), Tinos (approx. 3,000), Corfu (approx. 2,500) and Thessaloniki (approx. 2,000).

There are also around 150,000 foreign Catholics living in Greece, including around 45,000 Filipinos and 40,000 Poles as well as numerous United Ukrainians.

The Greek Catholics traditionally follow the Roman rite . The only exception is a smaller group of believers of the Byzantine rite (approx. 5%). These are the result of a mission attempt that began in Constantinople at the end of the 19th century (originally Orthodox Greeks who retained the Byzantine rite) and did not migrate until 1923, i.e. after the end of the Greco-Turkish War (so-called Asia Minor catastrophe ), as part of the Resettlements agreed in the Lausanne Treaty - like around 1.5 million other Greeks - as displaced persons from Asia Minor into the country. They were settled in Athens and Giannitsá , where to this day the only two Catholic parishes of the Byzantine rite exist in Greece. Historically and numerically (around 2,000 believers today) they represent a marginal phenomenon within Greek Catholicism.

Finally, there are also a small number (around 500 today) of Armenian Catholic Christians in Greece . They are descendants of Armenian emigrants who came to the country as refugees in the first half of the 20th century, especially as a result of the persecution in Turkey , and who mainly settled in Athens , where there has been an Armenian Catholic parish ever since.

Due to the strong migration of believers from rural areas (e.g. East Aegean Islands) or the mixing with Orthodox believers, which causes a shrinking of the communities, so that some dioceses became quite small in number over time, but also not most recently because of the increasing lack of clergy, many of the episcopal seats have been vacant for decades and the church provinces concerned are each co-administered by the bishop of a different diocese.

The Holy See has had full diplomatic relations with Greece since the 1990s. Apostolic Nuncio has been Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai SDB since September 28, 2017 .

List of dioceses

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nomina del Nunzio Apostolico in Grecia. In: Daily Bulletin. Holy See Press Office, September 28, 2017, accessed September 28, 2017 (Italian).