On October 23, 1956, Kocisko was ordained as a bishop at the Cathedral of Saint Paul of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh in the Oakland district.
Since its inception in 1924 as the "Apostolic Exarchate of United States of America, Faithful of the Oriental Rite (Ruthenian)", the organizational status of the Church was merely that of a missionary territory with limited self-governing authority, the homeland being Europe—albeit under Communist persecution since 1946.
A decree by the newly elected Pope Paul VI divided the entire U.S. territory of the Church into two separate ecclesiastical jurisdictions.
This prompted his resignation as Byzantine Catholic Bishop of Pittsburgh, and Monsignor Edward V. Rosack, the Chancellor of the Eparchy, was named as the temporary apostolic administrator.
Pope Paul VI on February 21, 1969, published a decree entitled Quandoquidem Christus, which elevated the status of the Byzantine Catholic Church in America from two separate eparchies to a metropolia.
Kocisko was installed as the first Metropolitan in the history of the Rusyn people by the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, Most Reverend Luigi Raimondi.
Many of these books and pamphlets were about the lives of the bishops and priests of the Eparchies of Mukachevo and Prijashiv (Preshov), who had suffered martyrdom, imprisonment and hardships during the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine and Subcarpathian Rus by the Soviet regime.
On June 1, the Russian bishops officially declared the Union of Uzhhorod to be annulled, justifying the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine and other countries of the Soviet block.
The pastoral letter uses language typical of Kocisko's approach, referring to Subcarpathian Rus as "our occupied homeland" and "our ancestral home.
[2] Although these processes are normally performed within the territorial jurisdiction where the person lived, the unique situation of the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Europe prompted Kocisko to act in his position of Metropolitan of the Ruthenians in the United States.
Subsequently, on June 27, 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified Bishop Romzha along with other Ukrainian martyrs of the communist yoke during a Divine Liturgy in Lviv.
[3] In February 1990, as Communist rule ended in Eastern Europe, Archbishop Kocisko led a delegation of American Byzantine Catholic hierarchs to the Eparchies of Prešov and Mukacevo to show solidarity with them after 40 years of separation and persecution.