Yes. There are twenty-three Eastern Catholic Churches sui iuris — among them the Ukrainian Greek Catholic, Melkite, Maronite, Syro-Malabar, Chaldean, and Coptic Catholic Churches — in full communion with the Pope while keeping their own Eastern liturgy, theology, spirituality, canon law (the 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches), and often married clergy. They are neither “Latins in disguise” nor second-class. Their faithful have paid for that communion in blood — the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was outlawed under Stalin in 1946 and survived in the catacombs until 1989. And they carry real apologetic weight: they are the decisive rebuttal to the charge that communion with Rome requires becoming Latin.

The honest Orthodox objection is not that these communities don’t exist, but that their origin and function are the problem. Most were formed by detaching communities from Orthodoxy — Brest, Uzhhorod, the Romanian union — often under the pressure of Catholic powers; the dialogue itself renounced that method at Balamand. And Rome really did Latinize them: the imposition of mandatory celibacy on Eastern Catholic clergy in America (the Cum data fuerit affair of the 1920s–30s) drove tens of thousands of Ruthenian Catholics into Orthodoxy. The Orthodox press the point: this proves communion with Rome does erode Eastern identity. These concessions are real, and a Catholic should grant them frankly.

But a Church’s legitimacy is determined by its present communion and valid apostolic succession, not by the purity of its origin-story, a test neither communion would pass — and Vatican II did not merely tolerate these Churches; it honored them. Orientalium Ecclesiarum declares them “of equal dignity, so that none of them is superior to the others as regards rite” (§3), orders their traditions kept “whole and entire” (§2), and affirms their “full right… to rule themselves” by their own disciplines (§5). Crucially, it answers the Latinization charge head-on: where they have “fallen short owing to contingencies of times and persons,” they are to “return to their ancestral traditions” (§6). The Council legislated de-Latinization. And this was no novelty — Leo XIII’s Orientalium Dignitas (1894) had already made inducing an Eastern Catholic to switch to the Latin rite a punishable canonical crime.

The deepest Orthodox objection is sacramental: that a Byzantine liturgy offered in submission to a papacy whose dogmas the East rejects is a form emptied of its content. But the Eastern Catholic Churches do not profess a Latin faith in Eastern dress — theosis, the essence–energies grammar, the ancestral-sin reading, and Eastern Mariology are at home among them; communion with Peter is a matter of the faith’s unity, not its Latinization. That is precisely what these Churches exist to show. The honest concessions stand — some unions were coercive, and the Latinizing wound was real, named and reversed by the Church herself. But the bottom line is plain: one can be fully Eastern and in communion with Peter, by the explicit will of an ecumenical council. The dilemma is false.