Georgian Byzantine-Rite Catholics

In addition to his theological work, his congregation, schools, and curriculum have also had a significant influence upon the Georgian language, its grammar, literature, and history.

Only after Tsar Nicholas II grudgingly granted religious toleration during the Russian Revolution of 1905 did Catholics in Georgia feel able to adopt the Byzantine Rite.

[1] In The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Union Empire from Lenin through Stalin, Father Christopher Zugger says that in the early 1920s nine missionaries of the Servites of the Immaculate Conception in Constantinople, headed by Bishop Shio Batmanishvili, came to Georgia to further establish the Byzantine Rite there, and that by 1929 their faithful had grown to 8,000.

[2] Tragically, their mission came to an end with the arrests of Exarch Shio and his priests in 1928, their imprisonment at Solovki prison camp, and their subsequent murder by Joseph Stalin's NKVD at Sandarmokh[3] in 1937.

Zugger cites a 1936 report that, "the Byzantine Catholic Church of Georgia had two communities, served by a bishop and four priests, with 8,000 believers",[5] figures very similar to what elsewhere he gives as the 1929 situation.

This church, Notre-Dame de Lourdes, is still in service,[7] although in the hands of Italian Catholic priests, gravestones in Georgian can still be seen in its courtyard.