IP,
Welcome to the Forum
The Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith decreed in an 1890 document, unrelated to the Ruthenians in the US, that decreed celibacy was to be a consideration in the selection of priests to be transferred to territories where their own rite was not native. In 1897, the precepts enunciated therein were applied to the United States by the same Congregation, stipulating that only celibate or widowed priests could come to the US - and widowers only if they did so without their children.
The decree
Cum Data Fuerit, dated 1 March 1929, stated: "In the meantime, as has already several times been provided elsewhere, priests of the Greek-Ruthenian rite, who wish to go to the United States of America and remain there, must be celibate."
In 1930, Bishop Basil (Takach), Apostolic Exarch for the Faithful of the Oriental Ruthenian Rite, formally asked Rome whether married men might be ordained. The Sacred Oriental Congregation replied in 1934, by which time what would become the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Diocese was well into its formation.
The response prattled on (sorry, it's the only legitimate description that can be given) about the "agitation and deplorable rebellion" among Greek Catholics Church in the US "motivated by the pretext that this Sacred Congregation had threatened the rights and privileges of the Ruthenian Church". It goes on to reiterate Rome's consent to a married clergy - "nothing has been modified or changed in that particular Ruthenian ecclesiastical discipline, to which, insofar as it concerns the privilege of a married clergy, the Holy See has consented, and still does consent."
Then, one gets to the
but The regulation (prohibiting maried clergy) arose not new, but anew, from the peculiar conditions of the Ruthenian population in the United States of America. There it represents an immigrant element and a minority, and it could not, therefore, pretend to maintain there its own customs and traditions which are in contrast with those which are the legitimate customs and traditions of Catholicism in the United States, and much less to have there a clergy which could be a source of painful perplexity or scandal to the majority of American Catholics.
So, as it goes on to say, Rome acknowledges and even guarantees Ruthenians ritual traditions, but can't affirm the application of their particular canonical praxis "at all times and in all places."
As far as I recollect,
Cum Data Fuerit was never renewed after 1949, but the precepts enunciated in it were applied and followed regardless. Rome's demand of priestly celibacy can be said, in retrospect, to have been at least a factor in the birth or invigoration of at least 5 Orthodox ecclesial jurisdictions in the US and Canada.
The issue lay more or less dormant until the '70s, when the Melkite Patriarch, His Beatitude Maximos V, of blessed memory, ordained two married presbyters in Canada (to which the decree had never been formally extended) for service in the US. Rome reacted by suspending their faculties for a time and the Melkites (on whom, as our revered Incognitus once observed
Roman canon law sits lightly 
) responded by shipping married American seminarians to the patriarchal territories, ordaining them to the serve of patriarchal eparchies, and affording them "leaves of absence" to serve the American Eparchy. This fiction was maintained for two decades and was eventually taken up by some of the UGCC eparchies, as well - those in Canada, as I recollect.
The essence of the decree has never formally been rescinded to my knowledge and the Particular Law of the Metropolia of Pittsburgh suggests that special dispensation is still required for it to ordain married men the presbyterate. However, most everyone else has long since gone forward and done so since Bishop John (Elya), then-Eparch of Newton of the Melkites, ordained Father Andre Saint-Germain, a married deacon, to the priesthood on Christmas Eve of 1996.
Many years,
Neil
