Father Chris Zugger's new book, Finding a Hidden Church, is the result of eight years of interviews and research covering the history of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic church in the USSR and independent Ukraine. Here  you will find not only background history of the Church before 1945, but the heroic witness of Blessed Theodore Romzha (killed in 1947), Bishop Petro Oros (executed 1953), Bishop Alexander Khira who died in Kazakhstan, and scores of priests, their wives, their children, and other people who fought to keep their beloved Church alive in a hostile society.

Read about the anti-religious attitudes of the Soviet Union, the imposition of harsh legislation, and the rupture of a 1,000 year old culture and Church. Also discover the determination of people to keep their faith in Jesus Christ and Catholicism alive by worshipping secretly at night, in forests, in barns, and how the Church survived with not one legal building and constant harrassment by the feared secret police. Discover the new ways Bishop Khira and underground priests came up with training new priests, establishing forbidden parishes, and nurturing the faith in an incredibly hostile atmosphere.

Included are short histories of what happened to the other Byzantine Catholic Churches in the Soviet bloc, five maps, over 70 photographs including some from the dreaded Gulag camps. Be inspired to renew your own faith in God and your own dedication to His Church and to realize that the impossible can be achieved, but only when relying on God's grace.

The book sells for $30, and is available now through our website or through Eastern Christian Publications . We will begin shipping books on June 22, so place your order now!

By Father Christopher Zugger 

Recommended by Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J., Senior Fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and EWTN host of television & radio.

This epic work traces the history of Soviet Catholicism from its rich life in 1914 through its tentative fate in the first sixty years of the USSR. Rev. Christopher Lawrence Zugger tells of the faithful men and women shackled by dictatorship, doomed to deportation, and abandoned by their own church in the west.

Soviet Russia was an empire born of atheism. Religions, per se, were viewed as a threat to the State's notion of individualism. By 1932 Dictator Josef Stalin firmly declared that religion would be extinct in the USSR within five years. In this compelling volume, Rev. Zugger details the Soviet campaign against Catholicism among many ethnic groups, several Catholic rites, and devout worshippers whose devotion would not be shaken.

The author, himself a Byzantine-Ruthenian Catholic priest, weaves numerous dramas of laymen and clergy alike into one gripping epic of persecution and consequence. He shows how they kept faith alive in prison camps, in remote villages, in monastery prisons, and in the secrecy of their homes, where the light of faith continued to burn brightly while churches crumbled or became dance halls and office buildings. This is the first book in English to recount in detail the fate of Catholic Russia and the Church in the various lands conquered by Soviet rule and its resistance to annihilation. It is at once a memorial to those who perished, a tribute to those who survived, and a testament to the enduring power of faith. $40

The Mission Society was founded in 1997 after six years of preliminary work by Father Chris Zugger and parishioners of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Byzantine Catholic Church in Albuquerque and Holy Protection Church in Denver.