This church practices the Eastern Christian faith developed from the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and sainted liturgical fathers such as St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great, who among others, labored to enlighten and save souls in the times of the Byzantine Empire from the 6th to the 13th century.
Evangelists and Saints Cyril and Methodius brought Byzantine Christianity to the Carpathian Rusyn area in 863. The year 1963 marked 1100 years of Byzantine Christianity.
In Eastern Europe, our mother eparchy is the Eparchy of Mukačevo. It is in and around the Carpathian mountain area, originally found in the countries known today, in 2016, as (Transcarpathian) Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. In these countries Carpatho-Rusins or Rusyns are a minority.
Here in Herminie Pennsylvania, in the 1920s, the founders of the Patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary Byzantine Catholic Church came from the Carpatho-Rus inhabited lands of the former Austro- Hungarian Empire, and from areas known as Podkarpatska Rus’, Prjashevshchina, Lemkovina, Galicia, and the Batčka region of the Former Yugoslavia.