Saint John the Baptist Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church (1945)

In 1900, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in Bridgeport formed the Greek Catholic St. John the Baptist Church and in 1907 purchased property for use as a church at 717 Arctic Street, near Hallet Street. Beginning in the 1920s, there was tension within the church and with the Catholic hierarchy in Rome over the issue of married priests. St. John’s defended married clergy and joined in the action of a Congress of Churches in Pittsburgh that severed all relations with the Roman Catholic Church. A new Orthodox church was thus created, called the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church. Back in Bridgeport, a group of Uniates, who remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, sued to gain control of St. John’s church property, which they reoccupied in 1944. This Greek, or Byzantine, Catholic St. John’s Church relocated to Trumbull in 1976. The Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic St. John’s Church, now denied the property on Arctic Street, constructed a new church in 1944-1946 at 364 Mill Hill Avenue in Bridgeport. The church successfully defended against another Catholic civil suit to obtain this new property in 1947. The interior was expanded and renovated in 1956-1959.