Long known for its ethnic diversity, Pittsburgh is also home to a rich variety of religious traditions, some of which overlap nationality groupings. There was a powerful reminder of that fact last week when Archbishop Basil Schott was installed in a Munhall cathedral as the new head of the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh. The archbishop was formerly a bishop in Parma, Ohio.
The Pittsburgh archeparchy serves 65,000 Eastern Catholics in an area stretching from Erie to Texas (a diffusion that complicates the problem of supplying congregations with priests). But it is no accident that its headquarters are in Western Pennsylvania. This area long has been home to Byzantine Catholics whose ancestors came here, as other immigrants did, to work in steel mills and coal mines and on the railroads. Distinctive onion-dome churches are as familiar a part of the skyline here as the spires of Gothic cathedrals.
Byzantine Catholics recognize the primacy of the pope in Rome while following rituals and traditions similar to those of Eastern Orthodox Christians. In Western Pennsylvania as elsewhere, this led to suspicions of Byzantine Catholics on the part of both Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics. In Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Byzantine and other Eastern Catholics traditionally have allowed married men to serve as priests, a practice Roman Catholics feared would confuse their faithful if permitted in the United States.
As with other ethnic and religious divisions, time has healed many wounds. At Archbishop Schott's enthronement last week, Roman Catholic bishops in their pointed miters mingled with Eastern Catholic bishops in their crown-like headdresses. Even more striking, three Eastern Orthodox bishops also joined in the ceremony, a testament to the ecumenical spirit, which happens to be especially strong in Western Pennsylvania and which Archbishop Schott indicated he would continue to foster.
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