Which jurisdictions have the most members of Carpatho-Rusyn, Lemko and Ruthenian Greek Catholic descent?

[The Liturgist]

In the US, while ACROD consists almost entirely of Carpatho-Rusyns, as the name implies, I would not be surprised if the OCA had more members in total, and my understanding is that a great many Rusyns are also members of the ROCOR and even the MP parishes in Western Pennsylvania.

Likewise, in Europe, where would one most likely find members of this group? I have heard there are a great many in the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and the Polish Orthodox Church, but my understanding is that both churches also have Czech, Slovak and Polish members, respectively. Also that one would find some in the Belarussian Orthodox Church and among the Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine.

I would be really interested in a demographic breakdown of this information.

I was recently very interested, on a related note, to learn about the histoircal representation of the Tosk and Gheg ethnic groups in Albanian Orthodoxy. The majority of the Orthodox are from the Tosk ethnic group, since most of the Bhegs were converted to Roman Catholicism, but before the nightmarish atheist regime of Enver Hoxha, a Tosk of Islamic descent, began, there were some substantial minority populations of Orthodox Christians among the Ghegs, for example, in the city of Durrës. And of course, thanks to the efforts of Archbishop Fan Noli, there is a substantial Albanian Orthodox Archdiocese in the OCA, which I would assume has members of both Tosk and Gheg ethnicity.

 

[ArmyMatt]

I know the OCA has a lot due to the work of St Alexis Toth.

 

[The Liturgist]

I know the OCA has a lot due to the work of St Alexis Toth.

Indeed. I would be very interested if anyone knows how many belong to what jurisdiction.

Also correct me if i’m wrong, but most of the converts who resulted from St. Alexis Toth joined the Russian Orthodox Church before the crisis caused by the Bolshevik persecution in the 1920s resulted in the breakup of the Russian Orthodox into the Metropolia, ROCOR, the expatriate Parisiennes who went under the omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarch, and those parishes in the US which remained under the MP, and also the formation of the first UOCNA parishes, which was highly controversial, and on the other hand, the situation of arguable necessity in which the Patriarch of Antioch took the autonomous Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America under his omophorion, whereas it had been under the omophorion of the Moscow Patriarchate previously, which is probably why the Antiochians in North America have quite a lot of beautiful tonal music, some of it of Slavonic origin, which one does not hear in the Middle East, although I do believe some other parts of the Antiochian diaspora use it. It might also explain why the AOCNA, before the tragic abduction of the Metropolitans of Aleppo in 2013*, did not have precisely the same warm relations with the Syriac Orthodox that have existed in the Middle East since 1991.

*This extreme tragedy did persuade me that I should join the Orthodox Church, and I suspect it persuaded a great many other people. Also insofar as it affected both the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, and because of the extreme outpouring of brotherly love between the members of the Antiochian and Syriac Orthodox churches, this was an extremely beautiful site to behold, and this was followed by the equally splendid occurrence in 2015 of Eastern Orthodox churches around the world, including the seniormost leadership of the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, among others, holding special prayer services on the anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

 

[ArmyMatt]

I know a massive chunk of those who converted under him joined parishes that are now OCA