St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral is the mother church of Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh, the American branch of the Ruthenian Catholic Church. It is located at 210 Greentree Road in Munhall, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh in the Monongahela River valley.HistoryBeginning in the 1880s, tens of thousands of Rusyns from the Carpathian Mountains flocked to Pittsburgh to work in its steel industry, especially Andrew Carnegie's large steel mill at Homestead, Pennsylvania. In 1894—two years after the infamous and bloody Homestead Strike—the large Rusyn community of Homestead met to discuss the formation of a church. In January 1897 the new church was officially chartered and dedicated as St. John the Baptist Greek Catholic Church.The first cathedral, 1903In need of a larger church, in the summer of 1902 two lots were acquired on the corner of Tenth and Dicksons Streets in the newly created borough of Munhall. It was designed by the Hungarian-born architect, Titus de Bobula, and patterned after the Rusyn Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Uzhhorod, Austria-Hungary. The church's twin towers, which rise 125ft, are composed of white brick in a Greek cruciform pattern set into sandstone. They rise 125ft. The church was dedicated on December 27, 1903 under Co-Adjutor Bishop Regis Canevin of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, which then had jurisdiction over Greek Catholics in its region.
