Konstantin Roskovics (1885?–1971) was a Hungarian Greek Catholic priest and pastor of the Greek Catholic Exarchate of Pittsburgh, which later became a diocese. He was one of the pioneering priests of the Hungarian and Rusyn Greek Catholic communities in the United States, serving for more than six decades in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. He is credited with organizing the St. Nicholas Greek Catholic Parish in Brownsville and played a significant role in the development of the Hungarian Greek Catholic community in New York.
He was ordained a priest in 1908. He was a married priest; his wife’s name was Jolán, and they had one child. He arrived in the United States at the end of the first decade of the 20th century and received his first independent pastoral assignment in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in 1911.
In Brownsville, he organized the St. Nicholas Greek Catholic Parish for Greek Catholic congregants who had immigrated from the Carpathian Basin—primarily from the territories of historic Hungary and Transcarpathia. Initially, services were held in the church of the local First Hungarian Presbyterian Church. Under Roskovics’s leadership, the lower church was completed in 1913, and in 1918, the upper level of the permanent church was also consecrated. The community began to grow rapidly and, within a few years, became one of the most significant Byzantine Catholic parishes in the area.
In 1922, he was appointed pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Yonkers, New York. During his tenure, the parish paid off all its debts, including a substantial mortgage, and accumulated significant financial reserves. The organizational and financial strengthening of the community was one of the most important achievements of his ministry.
During his ministry in Yonkers, he was part of an event of national ecclesiastical significance. On May 12, 1924, the readmission of István Dzubay (Stephen Dzubay), a former Orthodox bishop, into the Catholic Church took place in his church. With the personal involvement of Konstantin Roskovics and the participation of Father Peter Poniatyshyn, a solemn Divine Liturgy was celebrated, bringing to a close Dzubay’s years-long separation from the Catholic Church.
In the 1930s, he served as one of the pastors of the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church in Philadelphia. According to the parish’s history, together with Father Eugene Runtagh, he carried out significant improvements to the church buildings and also laid the groundwork for the establishment of a community center.
In 1938, he became the first official pastor of the Holy Cross Hungarian Byzantine Catholic Church in Manhattan. The Hungarian Greek Catholic community had organized in New York a few years earlier to provide pastoral care in their own language for Hungarian parishioners following the Byzantine rite. Under Roskovics’s leadership, the parish became firmly established and, for a long time, served as one of the most important centers of Hungarian Greek Catholic life in the United States.
During World War II, he served in Carteret, New Jersey, and then, in the late 1950s, at St. Joseph Greek Catholic Parish in New Brunswick. In his retirement years, he returned to Pennsylvania, where he continued to perform auxiliary pastoral duties. The last known stop in his ministry was Philadelphia.
Konstantin Roskovics’s life’s work is a fine example of the ministry of the first generation of Hungarian and Rusyn Greek Catholic priests in America. He was active during a period when immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe still wished to preserve their liturgical traditions in their own languages, while establishing new parishes and church institutions in the United States. Through the organization of numerous communities, the supervision of church construction projects, and the development of Hungarian Greek Catholic pastoral care, he left a lasting mark on the history of the Greek Catholic Church in the United States. He passed away in 1971. He was laid to rest at the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. His tombstone also bears the name of his wife, Jolán, who had predeceased him a few years earlier.