Papal visit to Slovakia comes during important anniversary year for Ruthenian Catholics (National Catholic Register)

Missionary actitvity “culminated in the reception of 63 [Orthodox] priests into the Catholic Church on April 24, 1646, at the town of Uzhorod,” the Catholic Near East Welfare Association writes in its profile of Ruthenian Catholic churches. “The Union of Uzhorod affected the Orthodox population of an area which roughly corresponds to today’s eastern Slovakia.”