Eastern Catholic churches are self-governing churches within the Roman Catholic Church. They have their own codes of canon law. They stopped referring to themselves as “rites” in the 1980s. In their traditional lands in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, married men are ordained to the Eastern Catholic priesthood, but in 1929 the Latin bishops of the United States persuaded the pope to forbid the ordination of married men for Eastern Catholic churches in North America. Several Eastern Catholic churches in the U.S. are trying to persuade Rome to re-establish the married priesthood, and some send married candidates overseas to be ordained. There are five major groupings of Eastern Catholic churches: Alexandrian, Antiochene, Armenian, Byzantine and Chaldean.
Eastern Catholic churches
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