Catholic Church in Georgia

A small Georgian Greek Catholic community has existed for a number of centuries, though has never constituted an autonomous sui iuris Church.

A Latin Church diocese was established at Tbilisi in 1329, but this was allowed to lapse after the appointment of the fourteenth and last of its line of bishops in 1507, owing to few numbers of Catholics.

However, an agreement between Pope Pius IX and Tsar Nicholas I in 1848 permitted the establishment of the Latin Diocese of Tiraspol.

Peter Kharischirashvili founded the first two religious congregations of the Georgian Greek Catholic Church; the Servites of the Immaculate Conception, one for men and the other for women.

The Georgian nationalist, Catholic priest, and political emigre Fr Michel Tamarati was the first to study the history of Catholicism in Georgia, eventually producing the oft-cited L'Église géorgienne des origines jusqu'à nos jours in French in 1911.

[2] Only after the granting of religious freedom during the Russian Revolution of 1905 did some Georgian Catholics resume the Byzantine Rite, without reaching the stage of having a particular church established for them.

[3] According to Fr Christopher Zugger, nine Servite missionaries from Constantinople, headed by Exarch Shio Batmanishvili, came to the newly independent Democratic Republic of Georgia to permanently establish Catholicism of the Byzantine Rite in Old Georgian there, and by 1929 their faithful had grown to 8,000.

[4] Their mission came to an end with the arrests of Shio and his priests by the Soviet secret police in 1928, their imprisonment in the Gulag at Solovki prison camp, and their subsequent murder by Joseph Stalin's NKVD at Sandarmokh[5] in 1937.

[6] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Latin apostolic administration (pre-diocesan jurisdiction) of the Caucasus was established on 30 December 1993, with headquarters in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, with a territory including Georgia, Armenia and, until 2001, Azerbaijan.

The first thing we did was re-establish contact and then find additional priests from other countries and local churches to come and help us.

The ecumenical path requires a great deal of patience and the constant search for new and potential opportunities for establishing relationships that could develop into bridges.

Theatine and Capuchin missionaries worked for reunion in Georgia, but under Imperial Russia in 1845, Catholics were not allowed to use the Byzantine Rite.

This church also provides mass in English, catering for the growing Catholic expatriate population of Americans, Europeans, Indians and Maltese.