Ea Semper

The letter created considerable dissatisfaction among the American Greek Rite clergy and laity since it did not provide for any diocesan authority for their new bishop. Rather, it made him an auxiliary to Latin Church bishops, some of whom (such as Bishop John Ireland in Minnesota) were notoriously hostile to the existence of the Eastern Catholic Churches.

Furthermore, it also modified several aspects of Eastern Catholic liturgy that differed from the Latin liturgical rites. Confirmation was no longer to be conferred at baptism. and could now be given only by a bishop (not a priest, as in the Eastern churches). No new married priests were to be ordained in America or to be sent to America. The pope's missive also mandated changes to the regulations governing marriages between persons in the Latin and Byzantine Rite.^[2]

These concessions to the demands of anti-Byzantine Latin bishops were made, however, in order to secure their grudging agreement to having a bishop from the Eastern Catholic Churches within their midst and were always intended to be temporary. The driving force for the appointment of Bishop Soter Ortynsky in the first place had been Metropolitan bishop Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who had persuaded the Holy See that establishing a Byzantine Rite hierarchy in the United States was a necessity to stave off further defections to Orthodoxy.^[3][4] Furthermore, on 28 May, 1913, Pope Pius X felt secure enough to remove all remaining restrictions upon Bishop Soter Ortynsky, who was granted full jurisdiction over all Rusyn and Ukrainian American Byzantine Catholics and was made completely independent of the local Roman Rite Bishops.^[5]