One Church, Two Disciplines Under One See

The discipline of a married parish clergy did not stay behind when some Eastern churches entered communion with Rome. The Eastern Catholic churches, in union with the pope while keeping their own liturgy, canon law and married priesthood, are the clearest proof that the practice was never itself the issue dividing East from West. For a large part of the twentieth century, though, that unity broke down on one narrow point. In 1929 the Vatican's decree Cum Data Fuerit barred Ruthenian Greek Catholic priests from exercising ministry as married men in North America, at the urging of Latin bishops who judged a married clergy a source of confusion among their own faithful. The order applied only outside the old country and it cost the church dearly: by some estimates as many as two hundred thousand Ruthenian faithful in the United States left for Orthodoxy rather than accept it, taking parishes and property with them into schism. The restriction stood, on and off, for decades before Rome finally lifted it, restoring to Eastern Catholic bishops around the world the standing authority to ordain married men that their discipline had always claimed. Celibate bishops drawn from the monastic ranks remain the rule on both sides of the communion; it is only the parish priesthood the two churches were ever divided on.