The Ordinariate was erected on 14 November 1951 with the papal decree Cum fidelium of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, which gave effect to a decision ex audientia of Pope Pius XII took on 26 October 1950, as Ordinariato para os Fiéis de Ritos Orientais no Brasil. The same decree appointed the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, Jaime de Barros Câmara, as its first ordinary. On April 13, 1952 Barros Câmara inaugurated the Ordinariate, appointed Francisco Nogueira Bessa as General Secretary of the same and created a system of general vicariates for the 3 major communities, each with its general guard: Elias Gorayeb for the Maronites, Archimandrite Elias Coueter for the Greek Melkites and Clemente Preima for the Ukrainians. Subsequently, it lost jurisdiction over those rite-specific Particular Churches sui iuris which erected their proper ecclesiastical jurisdictions in Brazil :
The ordinariate includes all the faithful of the eastern rite of Brazil without their own jurisdiction. Its seat was the city of Rio de Janeiro, but its current headquarters is the city of Belo Horizonte, because since 2010 its ordinary is the metropolitan archbishop of Belo Horizonte Walmor Oliveira de Azevedo. Previously, the previous 3 ordinary were archbishops of Rio de Janeiro and the headquarters was in this city. As per 1998 it pastorally served 10,000 baptized Eastern Catholic Brazilians in 4 parishes with 5 priests and 3 lay religious brothers.
Parishes
At present it only attends Syriac Catholic faithful, who have a parish, but the small communities of Italian-Albanian and Russian faithful dispersed and the faithful of other rites are insignificant in number and dispersed. Although the 2016 Pontifical Yearbook mentions the existence of 4 parishes in the Ordinariate, but there is only one Eastern Catholic parish in Belo Horizonte, known as Igreja do Sagrado Coração de Jesus dos Siríacos Católicos, whose parish priest, George Rateb Massis, is the Syriac Catholic vicar of the ordinariate. The Capela Nossa Senhora da Anunciação of Ipiranga in São Paulo belonged since 1954 to the Ordinariate as a Russian Catholic mission, but after the death in 2005 of its parish priest, João Stoisser, its few remnant faithful passed in 2013 to be part of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church together with the chapel. A small community of Italo-Albanian Byzantine rite used the Igreja de Nossa Senhora Aparecida in Riachuelo in Rio de Janeiro until the death in 2002 of the parish priest Atanasio Accursi. Since then the mission has dispersed.
