If you asked someone, “how many churches make up the Catholic Church?”, more than likely you would get a blank stare or a confused look. The answer, however, is 23: there are actually almost two dozen particular churches that are united in the Catholic Church. Twenty-two of those twenty-three churches are Eastern churches; in other words, they have their origin in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. Even though they make up almost all the churches of the Catholic Church, their members are only 2% of the total membership of the Church: Latin, or Roman, Catholics make up the other 98%.

These churches have been mostly unknown in the West for centuries, but fortunately that has started to change over the past few decades. With the rise of ecumenism as well as the technological means of greater communications, the barriers between East and West have begun to crumble. This has especially accelerated since Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Orientale Lumen ^[1], or “Light of the East”, which extolled the beauty of the Eastern tradition and called on Western Christians to understand and appreciate it better.

A great example of following this call is this video produced by Salt and Light TV ^[2] which focuses on the Eastern Catholic churches:

It is well worth the investment in time to watch the whole thing.