Georgian Byzantine-Rite Catholics - A Georgian Church of Byzantine Rite?

A Georgian Church of Byzantine Rite?

Some have treated Catholics within the Georgian Catholic Church who follow the Byzantine Rite as a separate particular Church with either 1861 or 1917 as the date of reunion with Rome. One Web site says that, in the 1930s, they had an Exarch, whom it misnames as Fr. Shio Batmanishviii (apparently a reference to Shio Batmalashvili, see below), thus implicitly claiming that an apostolic exarchate specifically for Georgians of Byzantine Rite had been established.

The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Union Empire from Lenin through Stalin by Father Christopher Zugger (Syracuse University Press 2001) says that in the early 1920s nine missionaries of the congregation of the Immaculate Conception in Constantinople, headed by Bishop Shio Batmalashvili, came to Georgia to establish the Byzantine Catholic Church there, and that by 1929 the community had grown to 8,000. By then the Byzantine Catholic Mission had come to an end with the arrest in 1928 of Bishop Batmalashvili and the murder of his priests. Bishop Batmalashvili himself was executed in 1937. Nevertheless, Zugger cites a report that by 1936 "the Byzantine Catholic Church of Georgia had two communities, served by a bishop and four priests, with 8,000 believers", figures very similar to what elsewhere he gives as the 1929 situation.

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. There is no evidence therefore that the Georgian Catholics of Byzantine Rite constituted at any time an autonomous ("sui iuris") Church, since canon 27 of the 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.

Until 1994, the annual publication Catholic Almanac used to list "Georgian" among the Byzantine Rites or autonomous particular Churches. This was corrected in 1995.