Rerum Novarum: 12/19/2021

Saturday, December 25, 2021

Friday, December 24, 2021

Briefly on Pope Francis and His Magisterium:

My words will be in regular font.

He lost me with Amoris Laetitia.

Amoris Laetitia as an apostolic exhortation. The exhortation format means it is as much about the application of doctrine as it is doctrine. Nonetheless, its teachings on doctrine are a part of the papal magisterium.

It is a matter of definitive Catholic doctrine (cf. Canon 750§2) that "religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will" (Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium §25) and on matters of the authentic magisterium "the Christian faithful are to take care to avoid those things which do not agree with it" (Canon 752).

I became actively hostile to him because of Laudato Si.

As an encyclical letter, Laudato Si has among the highest levels of authority. Its teachings on doctrine are a part of the papal magisterium.

Fruity Tooty made it worse.

As an encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti has among the highest levels of authority. Its teachings on doctrine are a part of the papal magisterium.

Traditionis Custodes put it over the line.

Traditionis Custodes is an apostolic letter issued motu proprio. This format can vary some but in the case of TC, it is a matter of ecclesiastical discipline to which at the very least external assent must be shown even if one does not like or agree with it. (Unlike the others mentioned, as this one is a matter of discipline, one can differ in opinion on it provided said difference is conducted respectfully.)

One need not be a sede to have their communion with the Church seriously impaired. To the degree anyone runs afoul of what I noted above is the degree to which their communion with the Catholic Church is impaired and confession of such sins before receiving communion would be advisable (cf. 1 Cor. xi,27).

The Church, which has her origin in the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is a mystery of communion. In accordance with the will of her founder, she is organized around a hierarchy established for the service of the Gospel and the People of God who live by it. After the pattern of the members of the first community, all the baptized with their own proper charisms are to strive with sincere hearts for a harmonious unity in doctrine, life, and worship (cf. Acts 2:42). This is a rule which flows from the very being of the Church. For this reason, standards of conduct, appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy, cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church. Even less can relationships within the Church be inspired by the mentality of the world around it (ct. Rom 12:2). Polling public opinion to determine the proper thing to think or do, opposing the Magisterium by exerting the pressure of public opinion, making the excuse of a 'consensus' among theologians, maintaining that the theologian is the prophetical spokesman of a 'base' or autonomous community which would be the source of all truth, all this indicates a grave loss of the sense of truth and of the sense of the Church. [CDF: Instruction Donum Veritatis §39 (circa May 24, 1990)]

Thursday, December 23, 2021

On An Upcoming Indefinite Suspension of This Website:

(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)

The threads posted over the past week make it clear to me that there is a serious need for another website sabbatical. It may not be seven plus years as the last one was but I do not know once it is initiated when I will be motivated to publish anything here again.

The past couple of years have resembled the time period from 2001 to roughly 2006 where certain extraordinary life stresses affected me very deeply. The difference now is that I lack my old reserves of fortitude to push through and be prolific despite the traumas. I wish it was otherwise but reality is what it is and I recognize it and must act accordingly.

I will likely continue to dabble a bit in social media and while it is not inconceivable that some of that material may be published here in the future; at the same time, I cannot promise that. The web will continue, full as it is with pompous blowhard pundits, agenda provocateurs, and apologists of various stripes either shrieking about some apocalypse or tactlessly trying to pick fights with others.{1} Such idiocy abounds but my mind is drawn to the writer of Ecclesiastes said "to everything there is a season and a purpose under heaven" (Ecc. iii,1). The season for me now is to spend my time focused more on matters of greater importance which means consigning this sphere to silence.

So with that noted, this website will continue to publish material until the end of the month at which time it will be indefinitely suspended.

Note:

{1} The same sorts incidentally who habitually cut and run like the shameful cowards they are when their offerings are subjected to reasonable scrutiny and their media masturbation makes a mockery of authentic dialogue. I have no energy for dealing with "fools who do not delight in understanding" (cf. Proverbs xviii,2).

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Points to Ponder:

(Revisited)

One of the advantages of getting old is that what the Byzantine liturgy refers to as the 'dread tribunal of Christ' that you're going to stand before puts the fear of God into you, and so you move to pray more. That already has had an influence on my spiritual life. [Fr. Robert Taft SJ]

At a couple of points in the first run of this website{1}, I made mention of the family death toll. Back in 2009, I mentioned that as of 2006, I had lost thirty odd persons either close family, relatives, close friends, etc. in the prior six years and that I had attended twenty-one funerals. The occasion of that posting was me breaking my "no more funerals" vow to attend two more funerals in 2009.{2} Not long after that, this site was suspended for various reasons and among them was the growing deathtoll. And it did not stop when this site was first suspended. After comparing lists with my mother a few days ago, my list is updated and it is longer than I thought it was. Without further ado...

Virginia Usher (3/2000)*
Art McCann (7/2000)*
Jane Clark (8/2000)*
Mel Clark (5/2001)*

Joyce McCoy (1/2001)-

Richard Dunn McElhinney (6/2001)*

James Dunn McElhinney (8/2001)*

Mary Kanski (9/2001)*

Mark Usher (3/2002)*

Hope Hitchman (3/2002)

David Kanski (5/2002)*

Cindy Greubel (6/2002)*

Annie Sabin (6/2002)*

Joan Lucas (11/2002)

Roy Sabin (12/2002)*

Buddy (1/2003)*

Ed Flynn (1/2004)*

Mel Denny (1/2004)*

Dr. Who (7/2004)*

Chris DiSomma (11/2005)*

Larry Gonczy (12/2005)*

Kathy Hanks (1/2006)

Kathy Edlund (4/2006)*

Sharon Colson (6/2006)

Leo McCann (8/2006)*

Cecilia Flynn (9/2006)*

---Imposed "No More Funerals" vow---

Betty Cribbs (12/2006)-

Ginny Riley (6/2007)

Alice Romanick (7/2007)-

Ann Ripplinger (6/2008)

---Broke "No More Funerals" vow---

Jerry Dykstra (9/2009)*

Don Hellstrom (9/2009)

Willie Romanick (11/2009)-

---Suspended Rerum Novarum---

Louie (5/2010)*

Hattie Denny (9/2010)

Bobby Kanski (3/2011)*

Claudia McElhinney (7/2011)*

Jack DeLisle (11/2011)*

Stan Kanski (1/2012)*

Betty Hale (2/2012)-

---Got married---

Vickie Holdgrafer (8/2012)

Mark Cribbs (8/2012)

---Moved to the Northeast United States---

John Loughnan (12/2013)-

Cutie (2/2014)*

Pat Kane (5/2014)

Sasha (10/2014)

Tristan (3/2015)

Dan Baker (6/2015)-

Kristi Pisano (6/2016)*
Mystery (8/2016)*

Steve Paul (2/2017)

Jim Duma (6/2017)-

Larry Usher (9/2017)

Jim Greubel (10/2017)

Keith McDonald (1/2018)

Vicenzia Barone (1/2018)*

Lanny Johnson (9/2018)

Bill Grossklas (10/2018)-

Mona McDonald (12/2018)-

Dave Altier (5/2019)

Marlene Eiden (6/2019)

Raffaelina Barone (4/2020)**
Frank D. Barone (5/2020)**
Gail Kanski (10/2020)

Gerald Holdgrafer (12/2020)

Patches (12/2021)*

My mothers list is even longer than mine -more than 80 names in the same time period. The starred names are those whose funerals I attended. The ones with dashes I found out about some time afterward. When you go through so many deaths in rapid succession, it is hard to keep track of it all. So in the past nearly 22 years, I have had 65 family, friends, and pets pass on and attended 35 funerals or their equivalents{3} during that time.

In the cases of Raffaelina and Frank Barone there has not been a funeral yet due to Covid but my wife and I oversaw every part of their burials. And Patches my sweet girl was cremated late last week and I will be picking her urn up this morning. She will join Louie, Mystery, and Cutie on my memorial shelf. Which brings me to the point I want to make at this time.

Just as "all glory is fleeting" (cf. George Patton), so too in a certain sense is life. And the time we have for investment in various endeavours is limited. It is good to write material of general usefulness from time to time and even occasionally stuff not as serious. But again time (like glory) is fleeting. We need to ask ourselves periodically if we are really serving others with what we do or if we are merely feeding our own egos.{4}

To continue this site at the present time in lieu of recent events and circumstances would run the risk of me doing what so many others online do; namely, make it a matter of ego and continue on just to continue. There is also the risk of me lashing out at others in ways that would not edify{5} and I cannot in conscience do that. For these reasons, the days of actively publishing material to this site are numbered.

Notes:

{1} From August 22, 2002 to December 19, 2009.

{2} Of which I was only able to attend Jerry Dykstra's as Don Hellstrom's was held halfway across the state.

{3} The only ones attended since April of 2013 were in the northeast, the ones prior to that were in Washington state west of the Cascades.

{4} I see too much Groundhog Day type reiterations online and elsewhere from people who really are just spinning their wheels uselessly on the same crap day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, etc. And while I have actually made conscious efforts on this site to avoid the groundhog day gibberish common to the pundits, agenda provocateurs, and apologists of various stripes, at the same time, there is still a certain degree of repetition even when one actively tries to avoid it.

{5} The pain is frankly too much for me right now, worse than it has been in years.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Anamnesis, Not Amnesia:

The 'Healing Memories' and the Problem of 'Uniatism'

by Father Robert Taft, S.J.

No one who keeps abreast of the religious news can be unaware that ecumenical relations between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches are in a period of crisis, worse, perhaps, than at any time since the official international ecumenical dialogue between these two communions began in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. The Eighth Plenary Session of the Joint Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church on July 9-19, 2000 at Mount St. Mary’s College and Seminary in Emmittsburg, Maryland, is known to have ended in a stalemate or worse— some have privately branded it a complete fiasco.[1]

“Uniatism”

What has led to this impasse is the phenomenon known as “Uniatism,”[2] a pejorative neologism coined to denote a method of Church union the Orthodox see as politically rather than religiously motivated, and contrary to the “communion ecclesiology” of the Church of the first millennium.[3] In “Uniatism,” one Church is perceived as an aggressor against a “sister Church” with which it happens at the moment to be in schism, absorbing groups of its faithful deceptively by allowing them to retain their own liturgical and canonical traditions and a certain autonomy. This type of union, considered the result of political pressure reinforced by violence, created not unity but new divisions in an already fragmented Christendom.

To understand “Uniatism” and this negative view of it, one must understand the nature of the reunions of the 16th and later centuries, and of the Eastern Catholic Churches that resulted. Regardless of the intentions behind them, these reunions were not, except in the most formal, theological sense, a restoration of the communion that had existed before the schism between East and West. They represented something new in the history of the Church, a departure from the past, which is why the Slavic neologism “unija” was invented to describe it.

Had the Union of Florence in 1439 been successful, the phenomenon of “Uniatism” would never have emerged. For at Florence the Latin West and the Byzantine East tried to face and deal with each other directly as equals. But the Orthodox repudiation of the Union of Florence in 1484 provoked a clear though perhaps unconscious shift in tactics by the Latin Church. Disillusioned by the failure to achieve a general union, the Roman Church began to sign separate union agreements with individual groups of Orthodox, thus nibbling away at the fringes of Orthodoxy in areas under the political control of Catholic powers. For the Orthodox, this was perfidious, like signing a separate peace behind the backs of one’s allies instead of working for a general peace. Rome could respond that they were simply entering into union with a local Church (which indeed the Roman Church, like any other Church, had every right to do).[4]

Phenomenologically, the Churches had in fact evolved beyond the pre-Nicene system in which one could still legitimately view the universal Church as a federation of local Churches with no intervening higher structures— as if Canada, for example, were just a collection of towns not united into separate provinces. So the Orthodox groups that entered into union with Rome were not simply restoring the former, broken unity between a local Church and the Church of Rome, even if this is what they had intended. Rather, they were separating themselves from one entity, their Orthodox Mother Church, and being absorbed into another, the Latin Catholic Church of the West. In short, they were leaving the Eastern Church and being assimilated into the Western Church. Far from restoring the broken communion between East and West, this led to new divisions.For the Orthodox, such partial reunions remove the whole ecumenical problem from its proper context. This is a view that most ecumenists now share. In this perspective, the separation between our Churches resulted between the hierarchies of East and West over ecclesial questions like the extent and powers of the Roman See; and it is up to those two hierarchies together, and not individuals or splinter groups of bishops, to solve these problems in common. Partial reunion only divides the Orthodox Churches and is seen as deceiving the simple faithful, who follow their bishops in good faith with no understanding of the issues involved. For the Orthodox, such partial reunions are not Union but “Unia,” breaking ranks and entering premature and treacherous submissions to one side in a dispute without the consent of one’s partners.

Centuries of East-West Confrontation

“Uniatism,” however, is but the tip of the iceberg, the heritage of centuries of East-West confrontation, stretching from the Middle Ages to the present. Since it is Catholic aggression against the East that is at the origins of today’s problem, let us review some of Catholic policy toward the East, much of which the objective observer can only view from today’s perspective as a comedy of errors.

The Catholic Church inserted itself dramatically into the life of the Christian East during the Crusades and during the Renaissance, in the “Age of Discovery” beginning at the end of the 15th century, setting up parallel Church structures in lands of apostolic Christianity and creating problems that exist to this day. In so doing, the Catholic Church was true to its evolving exclusivist ecclesiology in which there was but one valid Christendom, its own, entirely under the sway of the bishop of Rome, who could use his minions to do pretty much what he pleased everywhere.

Before the era of “Uniatism” at the end of the 16th century, Rome had worked for a general reunion with the Orthodox while striving at the same time for conversions to the Latin rite.[5] Previous to the Florentine Union (1439), Greek dioceses in lands under the control of the Italian maritime city-states, as in the islands of the Aegean, had automatically come under Latin ecclesiastical rule as well. The same was true in the Latin Kingdoms the Crusaders carved out for themselves in the Middle East, where Latin hierarchies were imposed on the conquered lands. But on the parish level the clergy and people were pretty much left alone.[6] This was long before the East-West Schism had hardened in the 18th century,[7] and was not really the same thing as a formal act of union separating the faithful from their Orthodox Churches and integrating them into the Latin Church.

The western assault on the East began in earnest only with the missionary era in the Age of Discovery, when Catholic missionaries spread far and wide on the heels of Portuguese colonization. Can one wonder that the local hierarchies of age-old Churches in places like India were more than bewildered by this invasion, which was in reality if not in intention little more than imperialism on the ecclesial level.[8] In this invasion, the role of Jesuit missionaries, perfectly suited for the task by St. Ignatius of Loyola’s universalist and papalist ecciesiology, was pivotal. The sudden, uninvited intrusion into the life of local Churches of a group of well-educated, dynamically zealous, foreign priests, owing obedience not to the local hierarchy but to a foreign “universal bishop” tens of thousands of kilometers away, could not but spell trouble.[9]

In Malabar on the Fishery Coast of southwest India under the Portuguese “Padroãdo,” the Latin invaders coopted in 1599 the hierarchical structure of the native apostolic Church of the Thomas Christians; and Jesuit Francis Roz was imposed as the first Latin prelate of the Syrians that same year. Portuguese archbishops of Angamali-Cranganore, all Jesuits, governed thereafter the once independent Malabar Church that had flourished in those parts for a millennium before anyone ever heard of the Society of Jesus. Chauvinistically, the Jesuits allowed only their own members to work in Malabar, with predictable results. On January 3, 1653, the exasperated people revolted. Gathering at the cross before the Church at Mattancherry, they took a solemn oath no longer to recognize the archbishop at Cranganore and to drive the Jesuits out. This has gone down in history as “The Coonan Cross Oath.” Native Syro-Malabar Catholics even today will take one with pride to visit this symbol of their heroic uprising against their ecclesiastical oppressors, the Jesuits. They took me there in the summer of 1986. I prayed for those heroic souls, literally driven out of the Catholic Church by Portuguese Jesuit malfeasance, and asked God to forgive this mindless destructiveness.

The Jesuit Mission in Ethiopia, the Society of Jesus’ first encounter with the Christian East in the time of St. Ignatius himself, was an even greater fiasco. The tale is narrated under the title “Prester John’s Business” in James Brodrick’s delightful classic, The Progress of the Jesuits. What neither Brodrick nor St. lgnatius knew, since both shared a Catholic ecclesiology common before Vatican II, is how amusing the whole story would be to someone with a different view of things, one not based on Latin ecclesiological exclusivism and Roman pretentions.

As the story goes, back in the days when gentlemen from the Iberian Peninsula spent their time discovering the Americas and colonizing the rest of the world, a Portuguese adventurer named Peres de Covilham came into contact with what he thought was the mythical priest-king Prester John in the person of the Negus of Abyssinia. That legendary African potentate, who had not the slightest interest in contacting anybody, promptly interned de Covilham for life, though he had the courtesy to provide him with a wife with whom to while away his captivity. Vasco da Gama was looking for that same Prester John chap in 1497 when he took a wrong turn and discovered India instead, which, as we have seen, the Portuguese also promptly colonized.

But eventually, contact with the Negus was made again. After a certain amount of skirmishing and feinting, relations were established. The Ethiopians, adherents of a pre-Chalcedonian Church, even hinted at possible ecclesiastical union, which despite its faults the Catholic Church, unlike a more introverted, self-satisfied East, had never lost interest in. That, of course, is how the Jesuits got into the act. On December 22, 1553, the prominent early Jesuit Juan Alfonso de Polanco, first Secretary of the Society of Jesus under St. Ignatius, wrote that King John of Portugal “has this month urgently requested our Father Ignatius to nominate twelve of the Society, including a patriarch, for the lands of Prester John...” After much consultation and searching about, not so much for the right men as for anyone who could be freed up for the job in those busy days, a Portuguese patriarch was chosen for hapless Ethiopia by Ignatius of Loyola, a mere presbyter of the Roman Church. On January 24, 1554, Pope Julius III confirmed the nomination of Father John Nuñez Barreto, S.J., a Portuguese nobleman, as first Catholic patriarch of Ethiopia.

From today’s perspective, the absurdity of the undertaking is simply breathtaking, as if President George Bush had asked the U.S. Jesuit authorities to name some American Jesuit to head the Iraqi-based East-Syrian “Church of the East” once things got cleaned up after the Gulf War. Of course such a judgment is inevitably an anachronism. One does not need to know much about the early history of the Society of Jesus to realize that in those days a nuanced communion ecclesiology was not a specialty of Catholics or Jesuits or anyone else for that matter; nor can one legitimately expect it to have been.

But the story doesn’t end here. Fortified with instructions from his presbyter-superior St. Ignatius, the fledgling patriarch and his coadjutor bishop, the Spanish Jesuit Andrew d’Oviedo, set sail for Ethiopia. Patriarch Baretto died at Goa in 1561, but Oviedo, who succeeded him on the patriarchal throne, eventually reached Ethiopia, where Jesuits continued to labor heroically for three quarters of a century until, predictably, they got themselves kicked out.

The trouble began under the Negus Susneyios, who had already embraced Catholicism privately. At his behest, the Holy See named Alfonso Mendez, S.J., patriarch. Mendez arrived in Ethiopia in 1625; the following year the union of the Ethiopian Church with Rome was proclaimed. The Jesuits proceeded to make the same mistakes their confreres were making at the same time in Malabar. The Gregorian Calendar, as well as Latin fasts and abstinences were imposed by force of arms. Mendez even wanted to impose the Roman liturgy translated into Ge’ez. Inevitably, the people revolted; the Jesuits were expelled in 1636; and Ethiopia was closed to the Catholic Church for two hundred years.

The Age of “Uniatism”

Classical “Uniatism” originated in a similar context, though this time it is not the foreign but the home missions, during the Catholic Reformation and the struggle with the Protestants for the soul of Europe. In this struggle the Orthodox Church was in a sense a bystander caught up in the crossfire of the main belligerants. The scenario is the 16th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where on October 19, 1596, in the church of St. Nicholas in the city of Brest in what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, five of the seven Orthodox bishops in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth entered into union with the Holy See.[10] This union, far from being “forced” or “imposed” on the Orthodox, as one always hears said, was the outcome not only of long negotiations, but also of a parallel religious movement tirelessly propagated for twenty years by the Polish Jesuit Peter Skarga. One of the great literary and religious figures of Counter-Reformation Poland, Skarga was for his homeland what St. Peter Canisius was for Germany. Skarga’s book On the Unity of the Church of God under One Pastor, published at Vilna in 1577, was without equal in promoting the cause of conversion to Catholicism.[11] Second only to Skarga as a vigorous promoter of the Catholic cause was the ubiquitous Italian Jesuit Antonio Possevino, better known to history for his more spectacular missions as a Papal Nuncio, especially to the Court of Ivan the Terrible, to whom the subject of Church Union was broached only to be rudely rejected. In the famous scene that has become a familiar part of history, as well as an active prophecy of the level of later Orthodox-Catholic relations, the Tsar insulted the pope and raised his scepter against the papal envoy who had pressed the cause of Church union.

But these Jesuits, far from inventing “Uniatism,” as they are often accused, took a dim view of Ruthenian Orthodoxy and favored conversion of the Ruthenians to the Roman Church plain and simple. By then it was evident that the prospect of a general return to the Union of Florence had become impracticable, and Possevino’s exchange with Ivan the Terrible confirmed it. But the idea of a regional, corporate reunion based on the precedents established at Florence in 1439— the Ruthenians would enter the Catholic Church as a body, preserving their own hierarchy and rite— was not the invention of the Jesuits. Initially, at least, the Union was not viewed favorably by any of the three parties— Rome, the Poles, and the Jesuits— traditionally indicted in the mythological view.

Far from being the result of some preconceived Catholic strategy, “Uniatism” was wholly an invention of the Ruthenian Orthodox bishops themselves. It grew out of the difficult situation in which the Ruthenian Orthodox hierarchy of the day found itself, between Moscow and Poland, Reform and Counter-Reformation. Of course these hierarchs did not see it as, nor desire it to be, a break with Orthodoxy. On the contrary, it aimed to protect the unity of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church, at that time under stress from a multitude of factors, including the desire of the Ruthenian bishops to preserve their independence over against the powerful independent Brotherhoods supported by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Ruthenian lands, the pretentions of Moscow from the East, and the pressure of Reformation and Counter-Reformation proselytism from the West. All of this has been amply demonstrated by the latest historical scholarship on the question.[12] In the well-informed, balanced and objective view of historian Ambroise Jobert, “The Union of Brest is not the work of Polish or Roman policies. The Ruthenian bishops, irritated by the reforms of [Constantinopolitan patriarch] Jeremias II, requested it, the Polish court decided, not without hestitation, to risk it, and Rome received the Ruthenians into union without making any precise commitments in their regard.” [13]

Despite fierce opposition from the Orthodox and even violent persecution from the Cossacks and later in the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great (1762-1796) and Nicholas I (1796-1855),[14] the Eastern Catholic Churches issuing from the 1596 Union of Brest and later unions consolidated and developed, especially where they had the protection of a Catholic regime, as under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There they acquired the name “Greek Catholics,” to distinguish them from the Latins.

The Communist Suppression of the Eastern Catholic Churches

All this would change dramatically with the westward expansion of the Soviet Empire following the Second World War. There is no way one can fairly judge the present tense ecumenical situation between Orthodox and Eastern Catholics in the former Communist East Bloc without an objective view of the martyrdom of the Greek Catholic Churches from the end of World War II until 1989. Attempts to attenuate or deny this history merit the same contempt now given to renewed attempts to deny the Holocaust. As His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Batholomew II said after Divine Liturgy at the Cathedral of St. George in the Phanar on the feast of St. Andrew this year, “Revisiting the past and examining human faults must continue in all directions . . . because whoever consents to the misdeeds of another or tolerates them by his silence, shares the responsibility of their author.” [15] It is in this exact same spirit that I recount what follows.

The forced reunions with the Orthodox Church began at the Pseudo-Synod of Lviv, capital of Galicia (Halychnya) in Western Ukraine, an area occupied in 1939 by Hitler’s Soviet allies and definitively incorporated into the USSR at the end of World War II. Lviv was the metropolitan see of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to which most of the population of Western Ukraine belonged. A Polish Orthodox parish in Lviv was the only Orthodox Church in the entire region. The Russian Orthodox Church had no representation there at all. Only in the light of these simple facts can the oft-repeated and widely publicized present Russian Orthodox complaints about losing to the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church almost all their Churches in the region of Galicia be placed in their proper context.[16]

In the winter of 1944-45 the Soviet regime prohibited all contact of the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy with its clergy and faithful and initiated a campaign of forced meetings and propaganda in favor of union with the Russian Orthodox Church. Opponents were arrested and tortured. In April 1945 the entire Greek Catholic hierarchy was imprisoned. The Soviet regime recognized the “Initiative Group” of three Catholic priests, formed to carry out the government plan, as the sole authority over the Church, instructing them to make lists of all clergy who refused to recognize their authority. Under police protection, this group carried out a feverish campaign of propaganda and threats. The NKVD pressured the unwilling clergy to sign a petition for union with Orthodoxy. Those who refused were arrested. At the end of February, thirteen Catholic priests were received into Orthodoxy in Kiev, and the two celibate members of the “Initiative Group” were secretly consecrated Orthodox bishops. Their leader, Havriyil Kostel’nyk, a married priest, was elevated to the rank of mitred archpriest, the highest dignity open to the married clergy.[17]

On March 8-10, 1946, a “synod” of 216 terrorized priests and nineteen laypersons, orchestrated in Lviv under the leadership of this group, abolished the Union of Brest (1596). This purported to be a synod of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. To this day the Russian Orthodox Church has claimed it to be such and has steadfastly refused to repudiate either the synod or its own role in the charade. But as the Russian Orthodox Church authorities are well aware, the entire Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy was in prison; and the entire presidium of the synod had in fact already become Orthodox, though this was kept secret until the farce was a fait accompli. The action was followed by massive arrests, interrogations, abuse, trials, banishment and deportations, causing incalculable suffering and death.

Russian Orthodox authorities ever since have defended what was done as a canonically legitimate synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, that freely and legitimately abolished of the “forced” Union of Brest. To this day they have refused to disclaim or condemn it. The Acts of the synod were published in Ukrainian in Lviv in 1946. In 1982 the Moscow Patriarchate issued bowdlerized (i.e., deliberately doctored) versions in Russian and English for the 45th anniversary of the shameful charade. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was not destroyed but driven underground, to reemerge maimed but still vigorously alive when finally granted freedom in 1989. That time almost the entire Russian Orthodox Church in Western Ukraine, clergy, parishes, and faithful, re-entered the Catholic Church en masse.

Similar forced renions with the Orthodox Church took place in 1947 in Transcarpathia, 1948 in Romania, and 1950 in Slovakia.

These are the unvarnished facts. This history is important for several reasons. First, it shows the demonstrable falsity of the accusation that the Catholic Church has “reinvented” or “resurrected” a dead and gone “Uniatism,” thereby stalling the Orthodox- Catholic ecumenical dialogue. A more nuanced view, one corresponding to the historical facts, leads one to recognize the following realities. Eastern Catholics were forced into the underground in the 1940’s by one of the bitterest and most violent persecutions in Christian history. Although this was done by Stalinist regimes, there is abundant and irrefutable evidence that it had the active support and/or collaboration of at least some Orthodox hierarchs and authoritative exponents. Each case must be taken by itself; and justice demands avoiding generalization. But there can be no doubt that ambiguous figures like Patriarch Justinian Marina in Romania and Archbishop Makarij Oksijuk in Lviv and Transcarpathia, were active participants in these historic violations of human rights. One of the chief Romanian Orthodox ideologues of modern times, the Orthodox priest and noted theologian Rev. Dumitru Staniloae (d. 5 Oct. 1993), gave wholehearted vocal support for this massive violation of human rights, insisting that the “reunion [of Greek Catholics with the Orthodox Church which took place in 1948] was entirely free and spontaneous.[18] This is not only a patent lie; it is also a denial of the bitter suffering of martyrs.[19]

Thereafter, authoritative Orthodox exponents carried on for forty years a hateful, mendacious campaign concerning every aspect of the life and history of the Greek Catholic Churches and of their “reintegration with the Mother Church” in the 1940’s. As late as 1987, during the Gorbachev era when toadying to the party line was no longer a matter of life or death, then Moscow Patriarch Pimen gave this mendacious account of these events to the Italian journalist Alceste Santini:

The anti-Uniate sentiments of the faithful of Galicia and Transcarpathia were strengthened especially during the last war, when the Uniate hierarchy sided with the enemy of the fatherland, the German Nazi invaders. Such collaboration on the part of the leaders of the Greek Catholic Church provoked a natural reaction. And so the completion of the process of liberation from the union [with Rome] which was expressed in the Synods of 1946 in Lvov [Lviv] and of 1949 in Mukachevo gave rise to great satisfaction among the believers of Galicia and Transcarpathia.[20]

The business about the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy and the Nazis is an oft-repeated calumny of the Soviets, who were, let us never forget, Hitler’s allies in the 1939 invasion of Poland and Western Ukraine.[21] Of course, after twenty-one years of Soviet rule, practically everyone in the USSR initially welcomed the Germans as liberators.[22]

And one can only speculate to what “fatherland” Patriarch Pimen claims the Catholic bishops were being disloyal, since before World War II Galicia was part of Poland, not the USSR. Furthermore, no synod whatever was held in Mukachevo, as Pimen knew perfectly well; and I have already detailed above the realities of the Lviv “synod.”

This is but one of literally dozens of examples I have on file of mendacious public denials of the past from the highest Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities of the Soviet Bloc, a denial rendered even more ludicrous by the fact that even the NKVD agents responsible for orchestrating the drumhead 1946 Lviv synod have in the meantime spilled the beans publicly and in print.[23]

Apart from some religious dissidents condemned by their own Church authorities and some secular scholars of good will like Andrej Sakharov, slow and reluctant admissions of truth began to come from some official exponents of the Orthodox Churches. These admissions came only after continuing the mendacity became embarrassingly counterproductive, when the world press, at last interesting itself in the issue, began to publish the true story.

Meanwhile the Greek Catholic Churches, some of whose membership (almost all in Galicia, Transcarpathia, and Slovakia; far fewer in Romania where the history and circumstances were quite different), having remained steadfast in their convictions, emerged from the catacombs to which they had been relegated and began to reclaim their heritage and give the lie to the systematic slandering of them and their history over the past fifty years. So there was no “rebirth of Uniatism,” just an end to persecution and the shameful conspiracy of silence.

With this historical freight in the background, no person of fairness and good will can be surprised at the present tensions between Byzantine Catholics and Orthodox in the former Soviet Union, especially in the light of continued Orthodox stonewalling in refusing to repudiate definitively and officially the forced “reunions” of 1946-1950.

Inevitably, the emergence from the underground of the persecuted Eastern Catholic Churches has led to confessional conflicts and a resurgence of traditional Orthodox anti- Roman hysteria. As Catholics struggle with the issue via an examination of conscience that is often painful, much Orthodox writing on the topic, highly biased, is often little more than a mélange of hysteria and lies.[24]

Painful as all this is for anyone with a modicum of common sense and Christian spirit, almost everyone (except for a couple of local Orthodox Churches which systematically boycott the dialogue) is in agreement that the dialogue must continue. But how? Those of good will on both sides of the dialogue are in agreement that “Uniatism,” as I have described it, must be rejected as no longer acceptable method for the future. But the past also not dealt with is a real problem blocking any future progress. That why of late Pope John Paul II has repeatedly called healing or purification of memory a way of dealing with the past. From my point of view as an historian, this will require each side to confront our common historical objectivity and truth, own up to responsibilities, seek forgiveness, then turn the page and move on, hopefully to a better future.

We can change the future, but we cannot change the past. It is the bitter heritage of this past that is blocking all ecumenical progress today. The hostilities created by that dolorous past are deep-rooted in the psyche of Eastern Christians, both Orthodox and Catholic, so deep-rooted that the average westerner finds them perplexing, at times even infantile and ridiculous. All of which provides stark confirmation of the need for “the healing or purification of memory.” In the twofold process of 1) facing up to the past and 2) then moving beyond it to a better future, step 2 is the work of the official ecumenical dialogue between our two Churches. Step 1, however, “the purification and healing of memories,” involves everyone.

In many ways this healing of the historical memory is the most difficult step. For nations and peoples live not by their histories but by their myths, As one historian— I think it was Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford— put it, “A nation is a group of people who hold the same mistaken view of their common history.” So in this context I would like to suggest some hermeneutical principles I consider essential to arriving at a balanced view of our common past.

Contrary to what is usually imagined by the non-historian, history is not the past but a vision of the past, in itself a complex reality. For ecumenism to advance, we must put aside our own limited, often hagiographical view of our past and seek to understand how others see us. Since criticism, like charity, should begin at home, and since I am a Jesuit, I illustrated this point already by making a Jesuit examination of conscience on some aspects of our role in the problem of “Uniatism.”

But if we are to make ecumenical progress, such hard-nosed reflection on our past cannot be restricted to Jesuits and Catholics. The Orthodox, too, must reach the point where they can make their own frank examination of conscience. Western Christianity’s historic defects of imperialism, power, and domination led to the historic crimes for which Pope John Paul II asked pardon in Rome on the First Sunday of Lent this year. An Orthodox response was not long in coming: Metropolitan Kallinkos of Piraeus, an official spokesman of the Greek Orthodox Church,[25] and Russian Orthodox Bishop Pavel of Vienna,[26] responded to the pope’s request for pardon and forgiveness not by forgiving and asking forgiveness in turn, but by declaring that the Orthodox Church had not done anything for which it needed to ask pardon.

Such responses are hardly helpful. Apart from the fact that they lead the press to subject their authors to sarcasm and derision, they are also untrue. A short list of what the Orthodox might reflect on were they to examine their historical conscience would begin in Byzantine times with the forced conversion of Jews already from the 4/5th centuries but especially in the 6/7th; with the persecution of the Armenians and Copts in the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451); the forced unions of Armenians with the Byzantine Church, for example in AD 590 under Emperor Maurice (582-602),[27] a clear example of Orthodox “Uniatism,” repeated in modern times by the Russian Orthodox mission among the Assyrians,[28] and the “Western-rite Orthodoxy” fostered in North America and, formerly, in France,[29] despite repeated Orthodox claims that “Uniatism” is an exclusively Western phenomenon. To this we can add the incorporation into the Patriarchate of Constantinople by political force of areas that belonged by age-old right to the Western Patriarchate under Rome and the imposition by force of Byzantine ecclesiastical authority on conquered areas of the non-Orthodox East[30] or of Catholic southern Italy.[31]

The latter provides an interesting parallel to the Crusades, about which the Orthodox remain continually exercised, collapsing chronology and acting as if the Crusades happened yesterday. By the end of the 6th century A.D., Southern Italy was almost totally Latin except for colonies of Greeks in Reggio-Calabria and some of the coastal towns. This situation was to change rapidly from the 7th century, when the campaign of Constans II (647-668) drove the Saracens from Sicily, reviving Greek imperial and ecclesiastical hegemony there and in Calabria. The Byzantine reconquest of S. Italy was carried out with thorough consistency across the whole socio-political horizon, including the ecclesiastical. Those who deplore the incursions of the Latin Crusaders in the East and their setting up of Latin hierarchies in competition with the already existing age-old Oriental ecclesiastical structures conveniently forget that the Byzantines did the exact same thing in Italy. Their military help against the Arab incursions in Italy was no more disinterested than the Latin help against the Turks during the Crusades. Byzantine ecclesiastical politics in Italy also involved an imposed religious Byzantinization of the areas that fell under their political control. For example, towards the middle of the 8th century, the Byzantines removed from the Roman obedience and placed under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of New Rome the dioceses of Calabria, Sicily, Eastern Illyricum, and perhaps also Otranto—-- all areas historically within the Patriarchate of the West from time immemorial.[32]

Medieval and modern examples would have to include the anti-Latin pogroms in Constantinople in the years immediately preceding the Fourth Crusade (1204), the Russian Church’s persecution of the Old Believers in the 17th century and forcible suppression of the Georgian Catholicosate in 1811, the persecution and martyrdom of Catholics in the Russian Empire following the partitions of Poland, and the active collaboration of some Orthodox leaders in the post-World War II events already referred to.

Of course some (though by no means all) such incidents were the work of governments and seculars rather than Churches or ecclesiastics. But the same is true of events like the Crusades. “The separation of Church and State” is a modern “western” concept without meaning when applied to earlier centuries. So mythology and polemics aside, neither “Uniatism” nor the use of force were a Catholic invention. They were part of the spirit of the times; and pressure to change religious confession was exercised by Calvinists, Catholics, and Orthodox alike.[33] Nor was this process only interconfessional: it happened within Orthodoxy too. As the Russian Empire seized lands under the jursdiction of other Orthodox Churches, the local non-Russian Slavic, Georgian, and Bessarabian Orthodox were incorporated willy-nilly into the Russian Church and subjected to religious and cultural Russification. In some areas of Eastern Poland absorbed by Russia, Latin Catholics were also subjected to this process; and some even lost their lives in the struggle.[34] The hatred this inevitably produced contributed to exacerbating the deplorable violence against Orthodox and the destruction of Orthodox churches in Eastern Poland when that country regained independence in the settlement following World War I.[35]

Telling the history of such past crimes justifies nothing, of course— but it does explain. For nothing happens without a reason; and to recount tragic events without also exposing what provoked them, or to recount only that half of the story that favors one’s own side, is not history but confessional propaganda. So instead of laying all responsibility for the present situation at the feet of the Catholic Church, even indicting the person of Pope John Paul II, as in a recent statement of Moscow Patriarch Aleksij II,[36] an unbiased analysis of the facts would show that the present siuation is entirely the result of Soviet persecutions and that the Russian Orthodox dioceses Patriarch Aleksij claims the Catholic Church destroyed were not in origin Orthodox dioceses at all, but Ukrainian Greek Catholics forced into Orthodoxy in the already recounted events of 1946. This is confirmed by the fact that in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Serbia, the three East- Bloc countries where the Greek Catholic Churches were not forcibly incorporated into Orthodoxy, none of these problems have arisen. The Eastern Catholic Churches there continue to live their lives in relative peace and are a threat to none.

So any true history must be integral not selective; and mature communities must accept responsibility for their entire past, not just for those selective episodes that they find serviceable to support a prejudicial vision of their virtues and others’ defects. With respect to “Uniatism,” then, Catholics must face up to the fact that, contrary to their mythologies, they have acted throughout much of history as an aggressor with respect to the Christian East; and the bitterness this has provoked must be laid squarely at their door.

But the Orthodox, too, must face up to their own responsibilities for the phenomenon known as “Uniatism.” For not all “Uniate” movements were the result of Catholic machinations. Bulgarian “Uniatism” was at least partly instigated by Constantinopolitan Greek Orthodox imperialism via-à-vis the Bulgarian Church. And the numerically tiny but by no means spiritually and intellectually negligible Russian Catholic Exarchate in Russia on the eve of the Revolution was a spontaneous movement from within the Russian Orthodox Church itself, largely among intellectuals and people of some substance, including several Orthodox priests, who were less than satisfied with the condition of their Church (reduced to little more than a department of the state since the time of Peter the Great), but refused to abandon their native religious heritage for that of Latin Catholicism.

Only the re-establishment of communion between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches will solve these problems satisfactorily. But if, in the meantime, solutions must remain provisional, interim answers to the pastoral and ecumenical problems posed by the existence of Eastern Catholic Churches must be sought with charity, objectivity, and realism, without the anachronistic, reductionist simplifications of history to which these communities are too often subjected by those who have concluded that the new age of ecumenism permits them to leave those they contemptuosly refer to as “Uniates” behind, making them easy game and dispensing their critics from the basic demands of human decency, truth, and justice, to say nothing of Christian charity.

Until the phenomenon of “Uniatism” in its origins and the factors behind those origins, in its history and in its present reality, comes to be viewed with more respect for historical truth, I see little hope for any lasting substantial progress in Catholic-Orthodox ecumenism. Both Catholics and Orthodox must reach the point where they can view and discuss not only “Uniatism’s” origins, but also its past and present history— all of it— without gliding over the problematic nature, in some (though by no means in all) instances, of its origins, its ultimate development, and its ideology, as Catholics have tended to do; but also without the use of selective memory, the double standard, the hysteria and even outright slander with which Orthodox writings too often treat it.

As the Russian historian Medvedev said in the title of his devastating exposé of Stalinism, K sudu istorii— “Let history judge.” Like it or not, no other principle will ever have any definitive validity in human affairs. That does not mean we do not forgive, nor does it mean we cannot, must not turn the page and move on. But I am firmly convinced that until both Catholics and Orthodox can put aside all confessional propaganda masquerading as history, look at this reality without blinkers or colored glasses, and see it as it is, with each side accepting its responsiblities, where necessary, in the condemnable aspects of its history, we are going to get absolutely nowhere.

For the Orthodox, this demands a clear recognition of the truth regarding the dolorous events of the 1940’s. Until the Orthodox come to recognize this history openly and without reservation, and until they own up to and repudiate publicly the active role some of their leaders played in the dolorous history of the forcible suppression of these Churches, their failure to protest this crime against humanity and their lying about for over fifty years, will, in my view, continue to render real ecumenical progress impossible. The days when the sufferings and the sensibilities of millions of Byzantine Catholics could be ignored or bypassed is over. Anyone who thinks the Balamond Statement, (though undoubtedly a great step forward from almost every point of view) does the trick, here with its admission of “unacceptable means” by civil governments in the 1940’s debacle, is not being realistic. Though of course the statement is per se true, it is true in the same sense that it would be true to describe the Holocaust as “an activity not entirely favorable to the Jews.” That won’t do for genocide, and Balamond won’t do for what was “ecciesiacide.”

Where do we go from here? Let us make one thing crystal clear: until an adquate, equitable, and mutually acceptable solution is found to these problems caused by “Uniatism,” defects in the origins or history of any Church cannot be used to impugn its present natural human right to existence, to justice, and to its own history. What has been said above against “Uniatism” can in no way justify calling into question the natural-law right to existence, and the freedom to be exactly what they want to be, of the Eastern Catholics both as individuals and as Churches. Life is not a history lesson, and the right to existence of any individual or group can never be at the mercy of anyone outside that group. This includes not just the right to exist— i.e., not to be physically exterminated. It also includes the right to their identity and tradition, and the right to their history— i.e., the right not to have their past or present slandered and defamed.

The notion that the right to existence of the Eastern Catholic Churches can be challenged on the basis of what happened three or four hundred years ago is historically and morally absurd. Did politics and even coercion have a part in the establishment of these Churches? Of course they did, just as they did in the establishment of Lutheranism and the Anglican Church. Or does someone think Henry VIII took a plebiscite to see if the English yeomanry wanted to separate from Rome? Does someone think the 16th-century German princelings who went over to the Reform, taking with them their principalities and all the Catholics within their borders, first put the issue to a vote?

Here I think we can all learn from the much-maligned modern secular West. It is this “western” culture, as the Russian Orthodox writer Alexander Solzhenitsin and others have pointed out, that invented “modernity” and its traditional values: a public life that is democratic and civil; respect for individuals and their civil and religious rights; a tradition of public service and beneficence in favor of the striken or disadvantaged both at home and abroad; an academic, intellectual, artistic and cultural life free of political restraint or the manipulation of state-ideology, and open to all; to name but a few of its qualities. Those educated in this oft-derided “western” culture seek to acquire habits of thought and judgment, ways of behaving and acting, that I think we should try to instill in all those we have contact with. Deliberately setting aside intemperate condemnation and unfair caricature, the virulent, the scurrilous, the emotional, the one-sided, the vituperative, the rude and dishonorable, the educated mind tries, instead, to respond to criticisms by a study of the facts.

What we need is what the much-maligned “western” academic culture espouses: the secular virtues of fairness, reciprocity, and the capacity for objective, coherent, logical thought. These ideals have deep roots in eastern spirituality, too. A recent article on the Fathers of the Desert in the ecumenical journal Sobornost was entitled “radical honesty about self,” a virtue at the basis of all true spirituality, but one, unfortunately, that can hardly be called common coin in much of the Christian world today. They are, however, qualities espoused by Orthodox authors of the diaspora who have imbibed what is best in this culture. Contrast, for example, the statements quoted about about there being no question of any Orthodox mea culpa with the sentiments Profs. Nicholas Lossky of St. Serge Institute of Orthodox Theology in Paris expressed at the 37th meeting of the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue in France on May 16, 1997, calling for an “ethic of dialogue” comprising “absolute intellectual honesty, especially in the re-reading of our common history, and in the recognition of our own faults...”

I think that these qualities of honesty, coherence, consistency, self-criticism, objectivity, fairness, moderation and courtesy of tone and language even when in disagreement— which I unabashedly call “western” because that is where they originated and where one sees them espoused and lived— are already elemental ideals and broadly acquired realities in the Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenical dialogue. The point if not that we never disagree. What it does mean is at the official level, disagreements can be discussed truthfully and courteously, without invective, rudeness, and slander. This is a source of great hope, when one realizes that not many centuries ago Catholics and Anglicans were killing one another, or how recently Catholics acquired basic civil rights in England. So maybe there is hope after all for the Orthodox and Catholics too, but until hearts and minds are changed, none of our other ecumenical efforts will amount to anything of substance for the unity of the Churches of God. Let us not doubt for one minute that this has repercussions for humanity that go far beyond the question of Christian unity. One thing the 20th century, and especially the Holocaust, has taught us is that there is no such thing as ideological neutrality. One is part of the solution or part of the problem, an instrument of peace and love or an ideologue of division and hatred. I have spoken the truth with frankness. I trust I have not mistaken my audience. As Conor Cruise O’Brien has said, “Respect for truth, intellectual courage in the telling of truth: these are the qualities of a real, of a living university.”[37]

Thank you for your attention.

21st Kelly Lecture, University of St. Michael's College, Toronto, Canada (Dec.1, 2000)

References

1.This despite the customary diplomatic language of the official press releases: SEIA Newsletter on the Eastern Churches and Ecumenism, no. 58 (July 20, 2000) 2.

2. I use the term “Uniatism” in quotation marks, because it is a pejorative term most Eastern Catholics consider gratuitously offensive.

3. For a fair and objective recent Catholic analysis of the problem, see Ernst C. Suttner, Church Unity. Union or Uniatism? Catholic-Orthodox Ecumenical Perspectives (Rome: Centre for Indian and Interreligious Studies/Bangalore: Dhamaram Publications, 1991).

4. On this see the remarks of Suttner, Church Unity 5-6, and esp. 58-62.

5. See for example the July 18, 1231 bull of Gregory IX (1227-1241) in A.G. Welykyj OSBM (ed.), Documenta Pontificum Romanorum Historiam Ucrainae lllustrantia (1075-1953), 2. vols., (Analecta OSBM, series II, section III, PP. Basiliani, Rome 1953-1954), vol. I (1075-1700) 19-20, and numerous other pertinent documents; cf. James J. Zatko, The Union of Suzdal, 1222-1252, JEH 8 (1957) 33-52, here 36; A.M. Ammann, Kirchenpolitische Wandlungen im Ostbaltikum bis zum Tode Alexander Newskis. Studien zum Werden der russischen Orthodoxie (OCA 105, Rome 1936) ch. 111.3.

6. For example in 13th c. Cyprus under Latin domination, the Orthodox were free to elect their own bishops.

7. See K.T. Ware, “Orthodox and Catholics in the Seventeenth Century: Schism or Intercommunion,”: in D. Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Relgious Protest (Studies in Church History 9, Cambridge 1972) 259- 276.

8. Three recent books illustrate all too painfully what a comedy of errors modern Catholic policy toward the Christian East, and especially toward Russia, has been: G. M. Croce, La Badia Greca di Grottaferrata e Ia Rivista “Roma e lOriente, 2 vols. (Vatican: Libreria Editnce Vaticana 1990); A. Tamborra, Chiesa cattolica e Ortodossia russa: Due secoli di con fronto e dialogo. Dalla Santa Allianza ai nostri giorni (Cinisello Balsamo [Milano]: Ed. Paoline 1991); L Tretjakewitsch, Bishop Michel dHerbigny SJ and Russia. A Pre-Ecumenical approach to Christian Unity (Das östliche Christentum, Neue Folge, Bd. 39. Wurzburg: Augustinus Verlag 1990). In this context, notethat the first two of these books represent a devastatingly honest self-criticism by Catholic authors.

9. This has been detailed in E. Chr. Suttner, Jesuiten Heifer und Argernis für die Kirchen des Ostens, Der christliche Osten 49 no. 2 (1994) 80-95. Prof. Suttner of the University of Vienna is a Catholic priest and no enemy of the Society of Jesus.

10.For an objective account of these events and their aftermath, the latest study is B.A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard Ukrainian Institute, Harvard Series in Ukrainian, Harvard University Press 1998). See also A. Jobert, De Luther à Mohila. La Pologne dans Ia cnse de Ia Chrétienté, 1517-1648 (Collection historique de I'Institut d'études slaves, Paris 1974). For briefer accounts of the situation with historical objectivity in Sophia Senyk, Vicissitudes de I'Union de Brest au XVlle siècle, Irénikon 65 (1992) 462-487; eadem, The Background of the Union of Brest, Analecta OSBM 21 (1996) 103-144; Silverio Saulle, L'Unione di Brest. Genesi e sviluppi storici, Studi sullOriente cristiano 2/1 (1998) 137-164, 2/2 (1998) 137-1 67.

11.It went through two editions largely because the Ruthenian nobles, enemies of the Union, had bought up and burnt so many copies of the first edition.

12. See note 10 above.

13. Jobert, De Luther à Mohila 343. For an Orthodox account in the same sense, see also
Jean-Claude Roberti, Les Uniates (Fides 44, Paris 1992) 75.

14. Suttner, Church Unity 83ff; W. Lencyk, The Eastern Catholic Church and Czar Nicholas I (New York 1966). Further literature in Suttner, Church Unity 124-5 note 70.

15. Translated from the French as reported in Irénikon 73 (2000) 112.

16 . Only in the light of the facts can one evaluate fairly, and in context, statements like the one made by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, in an interview in Odyssey (August/Sept. 1993) 34: And in Russia, even if the Uniates owned the Churches before Stalin, today the ratio of Uniates to Orthodox in these places has changed. There are far more Orthodox today than Uniates, so the latter cannot claim these buildings and want to take them back, be they schools or Churches, because where will the Orthodox go? Where will they commune? In the street? This is not Christian. Regarding the area in question, Galicia in Western Ukraine, where Greek Catholics were and are again the majority, that statement is simply false. And, I might add, where but in the street are many Romanian Greek Catholics, still deprived of their churches, celebrating liturgies in Romania?

17. He was assassinated, presumably by his Soviet handlers, on Sept. 20, 1948.

18.Ronald G. Roberson, CSP, Contemporary Romanian Orthodox Ecclesiology: the Contribution of Dumitru Staniloae and Younger Colleagues (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pontifical Oriental Institute, Rome 1988) 208-209; cf. 206-212 for a complete discussion, with abundant bibliography and citations from Staniloae's in support of the forced reintegration. Roberson is sympathetic to the figure on whom he chose to write his thesis, which makes the documentation he presents more devestating. On negative aspects of Stanisloaes career before and after the Communist period, see: Olivier Gillet, Religion et nationalisme. L'idéologie de I'Église orthodoxe roumaine sous le régime communiste (Collection «Spiritualités et pensées libres», Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles 1997) 92, 136.

19. The publication in western, even Catholic journals of laudatory necrologies (e.g., lrénikon 66, 1993; Sobornost 16:1, 1994) of this apologist for one of the 20th century’s great crimes against humanity without a word about this aspect of his career must be branded a moral scandal.

20. Mule anni di fede in Russia. Pimen, Patriarca di Mosca e di tutte le Russie intervistato da Alceste Santini (Cinisello Balsamo [Milano]: Edizioni Paoline, 1987) 216.

21. Most recently on the topic, see Werner Maser, Der Wortbruch: Hitler, Stalin und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1994).

22. The matter has been treated with historical objectivity by an author who is by no means an apologist for the Catholic Church: Hansjakob Stehle, Sheptytskyi and the German Regime, in P.R. Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality. The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptytskyi (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton 1989) 125-144. Sheptytskyi was the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church during the war, Stehle says. Quite unlike the Orthodox Metropolitan Polikarp [of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church] who, as late as May 1944, was still praying for Hitler’s victory over the Jewish Communists, Metropolitan Sheptytskyi grounded his hope exclusively in religious faith (ibid. 139). For a Jewish witness to Sheptytsky’s efforts to save Jews of Lviv from the Nazi occupiers, see Rabbi David Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary (Amherst: University of Mass. Press, 1990).

23. See Serge Keleher, Passion ad Resurrection The Greek Catholic Church in Soviet Ukraine 1939-1989 (Lviv: Stauropegion, 1993), with its rich Appendix of historic documents (pp. 187-298), all from the Soviet period, including the fascinating account, Here We Are Lord!, first published in Russian in the well-known Soviet satirical journal, Moscow, N” 38 (Sept. 1989) 6-8, giving the true story of the Lviv pseudo-synod of March 8-10, 1946, with the testimony of a sixty-year old colonel of the Soviet security forces, who had been an actual participant in the farce, ironically juxtaposed with contemporary statements from Russian Orthodox Metropolitan (now patriarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate) Filaret (Denysenko) of Kiev and Galicia (p. 264) repeating the customary lies claiming the reunion orchestrated by the 1946 Lviv Pseudo-Council had been free, as in the official Soviet line on the reunion. See B.R. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950) (Edmonton/Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1996) 179-80, esp. note 127, and 238-43; on Filaret, 241. Among the other documents, many available here in English for the first time, are: The Articles of the Union of Brest; the Decrees of the Eparchial Synod of the Greek Catholic Church in Petrograd, May 29- 31, 1917; the letter to Molotov of Greek Catholic priests repudiating the activities of the Initiatory Group formed in 1945 to instigate the forced reunion with the Orthodox Church; the January 15/28, 1950 pastoral letter of the Orthodox bishops in Western Ukraine and Transcarpathia concerning the consolidation of the reunion with Orthodoxy and the abolition of Catholic or Latin practices from the liturgy; The Life of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, a January 1980 document from the underground Church detailing the Churchs continued exisence and the persecution it was undergoing; the August 4, 1987 Open Letter to His Holiness John Paul II from the bishops, priests, monastics and faithful of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, publicly announcing their emergence from the underground because of the better conditions under Gorbachev; the April 7, 1989 appeal to Gorbachev; the April 7, 1989 letter of Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sterniuk) of Lviv to Ukrainian Greek Catholic Bishop Isidore (Boretsky) of Toronto and Eastern Canada, and the latters response; the August 27, 1989 pastoral letter of the same Metropolitan Volodymyr of Lviv and Halych, the first formal public statement of the metropolitan to his flock in Ukraine; the September 1989 open letter to Gorbachev of leading Ukrainian intellectuals. The rambling account concludes with eyewitness testimony of the Church’s spontaneous rebirth in the Gorbachev period, followed by documents relative to Gorbachev’s meeting with Pope John Paul II on December 1, 1989; the Declaration of the Council for Religious affairs at the Council of Ministers of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic concerning their intention to resolve positively the problem of the freedom of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; and, finally, the Statement of the March 17, 1990 Synod of Bishops of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine on the interruption of the negotiations of the Quadripartite Commission for the Normalization of Relations between the Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Churches in Western Ukraine.

24.This problem, too, can be understood and resolved only with attention to its objective historical context. Numerous statements from the Moscow Patriarchate state clearly the Orthodox postion on this matter. One recent example will have to suffice. Accusing the Catholic Church of proselytizing in Russia and Ukraine, Moscow Patriarch Aleksij II said on June 10: I find it hard to understand when, in the 20th century, I see three Orthodox dioceses being crushed by Catholics in Ukraine, when people are run out of their churches, priests are beaten and saints are blasphemed against... The Patriarch accused Pope John Paul II of failing to condemn the actions of the Uniate Church, which has occupied a number of Russian Orthodox churches and let other Orthodox sites be desecrated. This is not how you should treat a sister church, as Catholics call the Orthodox... Proselytism, which turns people who have been baptized into Orthodoxy, or who are Orthodox by their very roots, to Catholicism this also cannot take place between sister churches. This makes our relations difficult today. As reported in SEIA no. 57 (June 27, 2000) 3. See in this regard the very courteous, respectful, moderate in tone, but also forthright reply of Bishop Lubomyr Husar of Lviv, auxiliary to the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church: Risposta ad Alessio II, II regno. Anno XLV N. 865 (15 settembre 2000) 51 2-1 5; id., I greco-cattolic rispondon, La nuova Europa N. 5 (settembre-ottobre 2000) 53-56.

25. SOP 247 (avril 2000)14.

26. Bischof Pawel: Mea cupa is der Orthodoxie unnotig. KNS press interview in Vienna as reported by Gertraud lllmeier in Pressespiegel pro Oriente Nr. 115 (2000) 19-20: see also Glaube in der 2. Welt 28 (2000) Nr. 6, pp. 6-7.

27. Nina G. GarsoIan, “Secular Jurisdiction over the Armenian Church (Fourth-Seventh Centuries),” in C. Mango, 0. Pritsak (eds.), Okeanos: Essays presented to I. evaenko (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7, Cambridge, Mass. 1983) 228; eadem, “The Armenian Church between Byzantium and the East,” in Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Art, Religion, and Society. Papers Delivered at the Pierpont Morgan Library at a Symposium Organized by Thomas F. Mathews and Roger S. Wieck, 21-22 May 1994 (New York 1998) 7 and the references in 11 note 25. See also Suttner, Church Unity 39ff.

28. See J.F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission (Oxford: Clarendon 1992) 21 6-234.

29. Roberti, Les Uniates 102-7; W.S. Schneirla, The Western Rite in the Orthodox Church, 2/2 (1958) 2045, and the discussion in ibid. 2/4 (1958) 37-38, 3/1 (1959) 36-37; Missel orthodoxe. Rit occidental Gallican de s. Germain de Pans (6e siècle). ltalique pré-Célestinien (debut 5e siècle). Missel ou livre de Ia synaxe liturgique approuvé et authorisé pour les églises orthodoxes de rit occidental relevant du Patriarcat de Moscou. Version française officielle établie sur le texte latin original. Edition revue et typique (Collection «Documents liturgiques», supplément de Ia revue «Contacts», n° 38/39, 2e/3e trim. 1962, Paris 1962) with further bibliography on p. 96. According to a recent report, the Western Rite Orthodox Vicariate uder the jurisdiction of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North. America has 27 parishes: Eastern Churches Journal 6/3 (1999) 150.

30. Examples in Suttner, Church Unity 38-43.

31. On the history of the Byzantines in Southern Italy see Vera von Falkenhausen, I bizantini in Italia, in G. Cavallo et alii, I bizantini in Italia (Antica Madro, collana di studi sullltalia ant ica, a cura di G. Pugliese Carratelli, Milan 1982) 1-136.

32. See V. Grumel, L'annexion de llllyricum oriental, de la Sicile et de la Calaabre au Patriarcat de Constantinope, Recherches de science religieuse 40 (1951-52)191-200.

33. Our contemporary notions of religious tolerance were totally foreign to that earlier epoch. See O.P. Grell and B. Scribner, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (New York 1996).

34. Suttner, Church Unity 85.

35. Stephen Joseph Bachtalowsky, CSSR, Nicholas Charnetsky, CSSR. Bishop-Confessor, translated by George J. Perejda, CSSR (Yorkton, Saskatechewan: Publications of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, Redeemers Voice Press, nd.) 89-95.

36.See note 23 above.

37. New York Times Review of Books (Sept. 10, 2000) 45.

Monday, December 20, 2021

Eastern-Rite Catholicism Its Heritage and Vocation

By Robert F. Taft

In my Father’s house there are many mansions (John 14:2)

INTRODUCTION

The first crisis faced by the primitive Church concerned a problem that was to recur again and again throughout the whole of Christian hi

Through the influence of St. Paul, the Church solved this crisis by coming to see that her unity and universality, like that of God’s creation, is not destroyed but enriched by diversity. From the beginning this catholic spirit had animated Paul’s apostolate among the Gentiles at Antioch. "But some came down from Judea and began to teach the brethren, saying, ‘Unless you be circumcised after the manner of Moses, you cannot be saved.’ And when no little objection was made against them by Paul and Barnabas, they decided that Paul and Barnabas and certain others of them should go up to the apostles and presbyters at Jerusalem about this question" (Acts 15,1.2).

The Council of Jerusalem, convoked to settle this dispute, supported the Pauline spirit and vigorously opposed the imposition of the Mosaic Law on Gentile converts (Acts 15,6.29). This first definition of Christianity as a new and eternal covenant not bound to the religious and cultural limits of the Old Law enabled the early Church to adopt a policy of accommodation that would reflect an inner catholicity in her external structure. Branching out from Judea, the Church took conditions as she found them, establishing local Churches which organized their own life according to the demands of the moment. Through the centuries this process of adaptation resulted in many traditions, Western and Eastern, which are still part of our Catholic heritage today.

The modern diaspora of Eastern European peoples has made most of us aware of this cultural diversity in the Catholic Church. Married priests, liturgy in the vernacular, Communion under both species—all these things, we now realize, have their place in those Catholic traditions that we call the "Eastern Rites."

But in our modern world, gradually evolving toward a unified secular culture dominated by Western technology, is there any significant place left for our Eastern Rites, ancient and venerable to be sure, but perhaps also passe? Are they a truly relevant part of our heritage as Catholics in this modern world? The Popes have certainly thought so. They have repeated time and again that not only are the Eastern Rites of great beauty and value for their own members, but that, together with the Western Rites, they manifest the glory of God’s Church and provide Western Catholics with a deeper appreciation of their own traditions. In fact we can add that the Catholic whose idea of Catholicism is limited to his own particular tradition has a distorted notion of the true nature of his Church.

In the interest, then, of fostering a truly catholic openness of mind and heart to all that is so rich and valid in our Catholic traditions, it will be profitable to look beyond the external rites and ceremonies of Eastern Catholicism to the true nature and value of Eastern Christianity in the Church today. We will first try to discover what a "Rite" is, and examine briefly how the Eastern Rites originated. Then we will study in somewhat greater detail the heritage and spirit of the Christian East, its value, its problems, and its vocation in the Church today.

WHAT IS A "RITE"?

A "Rite" is simply Catholicism as it has developed according to the culture and spirit of a particular people. The word "rite," bearing as it does the connotation of "ritual" or "ceremony," is perhaps a poor choice to denote an extremely complex and rich reality. For "Rite" is not just liturgy, but rather a complete Catholic tradition, the unique way that a particular community of the faithful perceives, expresses and lives its Catholic life within the one Mystical Body of Christ.

We best know the various Rites of the Church through their liturgies. This is understandable, for liturgy is the most perfect and "official" expression of the soul that animates each tradition. It is by no means the only expression, however. "Rite" also includes all the other elements we would expect to find in a Catholic culture: schools of theology with their Fathers and Doctors, canonical discipline, schools of spirituality, devotions, monasticism, art, architecture, hymns, music and also—and this must be stressed—the peculiar spirit that created this tradition, that in turn is fed by this tradition and that is essential to this tradition.

There is of course no question of one Catholic Rite denying what another affirms. All Rites are one in the union of Christ’s Church under the headship of the Bishop of Rome. All have the same sacraments, the same dogmas, the same moral code. The differences are a matter of emphasis. Each tradition stresses diverse aspects of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Tradition common to all.

In his encyclical Orientalis Ecclesiae Pius XII indicates clearly that our Oriental traditions include much more than liturgy:

It is…important to hold in due esteem all that constitutes for the Oriental peoples their own special patrimony, as it were, handed down to them by their forefathers; and this whether it regards the sacred liturgy and the hierarchical orders, or the other essentials of Christian life, provided only that all is in full conformity with genuine religious faith and with the right rules of moral conduct. For a lawful freedom must be allowed to each and every people of Oriental Rite in all their own peculiar genius and temperament, so long as they are not in contrast with the true and integral doctrine of Jesus Christ.

An Oriental Rite, therefore, is not just a different way of saying Mass. It is a "special patrimony" with its own feasts and fasts, saints and shrines. It is devotion to the Mother of God without rosaries, devotion to saints without novenas, devotion to the Eucharist without Exposition or Benediction, the observance of Lent without stations of the cross. And what is more important, it is another "genius and temperament," an Oriental ethos from which these ritual and devotional differences flow.

ORIGINS OF THE EASTERN RITES

During the first few centuries after Christ there arose in the Eastern Roman Empire two main groups of local Churches centered around the great sees of Antioch in Syria and Alexandria in Egypt. These centers of ecclesiastical life were not only the major cities of the Eastern Empire, but were also sees of apostolic origin. St. Peter himself had ruled Antioch before journeying to Rome, and Alexandria traced its origins to the Prince of the Apostles through his disciple St. Mark.

Because of the prestige of these apostolic sees, their liturgies and customs exerted a great influence on the lesser Churches within ‘their spheres of influence. The gospel had first been preached in the great cities of the Empire. From them, the surrounding country was evangelized. Missionary bishops consecrated and sent forth by the bishops of the older sees looked upon their consecrators as their superiors, and imitated the customs of the Mother Church.

The influence of a third Church, Jerusalem, must also be noted. The sacred position of the Holy City as the scene of our redemption made it a great center of pilgrimage and monasticism, and its liturgical customs spread throughout the whole world. Although the Rite of Jerusalem no longer exists as a distinct tradition, traces of its usages can be found to a greater or lesser degree in the customs of every Rite existing today.

The traditions of these three Churches, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, are the basic sources from which our present Eastern Rites have evolved. The primitive Greek usages of Alexandria underwent strong monastic and Syrian influences and eventually developed into the Coptic Rite of present-day Egypt and the Ethiopic Rite, the national religious tradition of Ethiopia. The evolution of the Syrian tradition centered in Jerusalem and Antioch is much more complicated. In Syria itself, the ancient Greek liturgy of Antioch later adopted customs proper to Jerusalem and produced the West Syrian Rite found in the Levant and among the Malankarese Christians of India. The Maronite Rite of Lebanon is basically a Latinized variant of the same tradition.

In Persia, beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire, the Syrian tradition had a different history. Christianity first spread to the Persian Empire from Edema in Mesopotamia, a daughter Church of Antioch and an important center of Semitic culture. Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem were Greek in language and culture during this formative period of the early Church, and Greek was their liturgical language. Coptic and Syriac were introduced later, as the Church spread to the hinterlands of Egypt and Syria and customs were remodeled under the influence of the monasteries and small villages. But the East Syrian or Chaldean Rite which took shape in the Church of Edessa at a very early date preserved the Semitic stamp of the first Jewish Churches. This tradition is found today among the Chaldeans and Nestorians of the Middle East and, in a form extremely Latinized but now being restored, among the Malabarese Christians of India.

With the rise of Constantinople to the position of chief patriarchal see in the East during the 4th and 5th centuries, the Syrian tradition entered upon a new and most fruitful development. When the Emperor Constantine moved the seat of his Imperial government to Byzantium in 330, the bishop of the new capital was only a suffragan of the Metropolitan of Heraclea in Thrace, within the Patriareliate of Antioch. But Byzantium became Constantinople, the "New Rome," and her bishop, court prelate of the Roman Emperor, gained a position of great political importance in both Church and Empire. The supremacy of the Church of Constantinople in the East soon became a fait accompli, and eventually received the approval of the whole Church.

As we might expect, the new pre-eminence of Constantinople led to a development and enrichment of the old traditions of Byzantium. The customs of Antioch and Jerusalem played the decisive role in the final formation of the superb Byzantine Rite. This Rite was to spread throughout most of the Christian East and into the Slavic lands, and is found all over the world today.

The Christian traditions of Armenia have similar origins. A "distinctive synthesis of Syrian and Cappadocian elements within a framework borrowed from Jerusalem" (Dalmais), the Armenian Rite bears a resemblance to the old liturgy of Byzantium. By the end of the 4th century the Church of Armenia had become independent of the Metropolitan of Caesarea in Cappadocia, and its liturgy, celebrated in the national language, was later modified under Byzantine and Latin influence. Armenian Christians throughout the world still follow these customs.

HERITAGE AND GENIUS OF THE CHRISTIAN EAST

So far we have limited our observations to the liturgical development of the Eastern Rites. This was necessary, for the evolution of a religious culture can be observed only in the concrete forms it adopts to express its inner genius. But as we have seen, there is far more to Rite than ceremonial. We can turn now to what Pius XII called the "special patrimony" and the "peculiar genius and temperament" of the Christian East.

The student of Church History cannot help noticing that the story of early Christianity is centered for the most part in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. The Church was born in the East. For centuries the East dominated her life and thought. The center of gravity shifted westward around the 8th century. By then the Eastern Churches had left the indelible stamp of their genius on the future life of the Church. The litany of their Fathers and Doctors—Ignatius, Ephrem, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Damascene—is unrivaled. In the East, Christian theology and monasticism began before being adopted and enriched in the West. For 900 years every Ecumenical Council took place in the East. There the great battles of Christian orthodoxy were fought. Prayers borrowed from the Eastern liturgies—Kyrie eleison, Gloria, Credo, Agnus Dei—are still sung in Latin churches today.

What are some of the products of this Christian genius that flowed out from the four great Oriental sees, which were for over 1000 years the crossroads of world thought and civilization? Each of the four patriarchal sees of the East played its distinct role in forming the common patrimony of the Catholic Church. From Antioch St. Paul went forth to convert the world. St. Peter was her first bishop; his successor St. Ignatius is still remembered for his glorious martyrdom as well as for the spirit of Christ that shines forth in his epistles to the Churches of Asia Minor. The celebrated theological schools of the Antiochene tradition and the Fathers and Doctors they produced remain a living force in Christian theology today.

There is no need to stress what we have received from Jerusalem. The primitive form of her liturgy of St. James, brother of the Lord, is the ancestor of all Christian worship. In her churches Egeria, the famous Aquitanian nun, heard the Kyrie eleison for the first time, and the Holy Week services of Jerusalem spread to the whole world with the returning pilgrims of East and West.

It was in ‘these two cities, Antioch and Jerusalem, that Christian worship developed its finest symbolism. The West Syrian liturgy overflows with a wealth of poetic hymnology and symbolism. Its intensely human spirit reminds one of the spontaneity and drama of the Medieval West. But there is also a sense of mystery, a focus on the Second Coming, and the symbolism is directed at making this unutterable mystery felt. The East Syrian liturgy is the most primitive form of Catholic worship still used today. It evolved into its present form at an early date, beyond the Roman world, in small Christian communities where Jewish influence remained strong. It is a liturgy of great austerity and simplicity, with little rhetorical or ceremonial embellishment.

Alexandria rivaled Antioch in its contribution to Christian life and thought. Origen, St. Athanasius and St. Cyril of the Alexandrine school are among the great luminaries of the early Church. But we must look beyond the city to the desert for one of the Alexandrine tradition’s greatest contributions to the Christian experience. With St. Paul of Thebes, St. Anthony, St. Pachomius and their successors, the desert of Egypt became one huge monastery, to which St. Pachomius gave the first monastic rule of life. "If you want to see heaven on earth," wrote St. John Chrysostom, "go into the desert of Egypt." The liturgy of Alexandria, modified under monastic influence, still bears the stamp of this desert life. It is a monastic liturgy, long and slow, with little external ceremony, but with much active participation by the community.

For the Eastern tradition that is most highly developed and widespread in the world today we must turn to Constantinople. In the Byzantine liturgy, the exuberance of Antioch and Jerusalem is tempered by the balance and moderation of Byzantine civilization. It is a liturgy of profound adoration, with a deep sense of mystery; a liturgy which turns the pomp of the imperial court ceremonial into a service of the Heavenly King. In Slavic lands, this Rite took on new dimensions not so much in textual and rubrical modifications, but in the spirit and "style" of Christian life and worship. The Slav’s profound spirit of reverence and contemplation gives a tone and tempo to his worship that distinguishes it from the more vigorous celebration of the Greek. It is by this spirit, with its products in art and spirituality, that the Russians made their lasting contribution to the Byzantine Rite.

The Armenian liturgy is more reserved in its expression. Its solemn and recollected spirit, a bit mournful, is marked by one of the most beautiful chants in all the Eastern liturgies, as well as by the beauty of its hymns and the magnificence of its ceremonial and appointments.

SPIRIT OF THE EASTERN RITES

The historical value of all this is obvious. But we are not antiquarians. Our initial question remains, ‘then: are the Eastern Rites a vital force in the Church today? Is there any significant place in -the modern Church for something "Oriental"?

Do not be misled by the terms "Eastern" and "Oriental" as applied to the traditions we have been discussing. The "Orient" of the Oriental Rites was the Eastern Roman Empire, much of which lay within the "West" of today. It is true that some Eastern Rites are immersed in an atmosphere strange and exotic to the Westerner. But we must not mistake the clothes for the man. The essence of Eastern Christianity cannot be reduced to certain exotic aspects of its ceremonial and chant, which are the product of time and can change. For Oriental Catholicism is not Catholicism in an old-fashioned suit, but a "style" of Christianity, a peculiar Christian "spirit" which is of lasting value. It is as suitable and adaptable to ‘the historical and cultural evolution of the world as the Second Vatican Council is now proving our Western traditions to be.

Each Oriental Rite gives its own special nuance to -this "type" of Catholicism, but in its broadest outlines the Eastern tradition is one with respect to its Western complement. Consequently, although we will limit our illustrations of the Oriental spirit to the Byzantine tradition, most of what we say will be characteristic of Eastern Catholicism as a whole.

1. Eastern Catholicism Is Non-Latin

We have already seen, implicitly, one fundamental characteristic of Eastern Catholicism: it is non-Latin. The East did not receive the faith as daughter Churches of Rome, but directly from the apostles. This was a decisive factor in shaping the ecclesiastical physiognomy of the Catholic East.

The unique position of the Roman Church as the See of Peter and sole apostolic and patriarchal Church of the West provided an ideal setting for the growth of the highly centralized ecclesiastical organization so characteristic of Latin Catholicism. This development was facilitated by the fall of the Western Roman Empire. This event created a political and cultural vacuum that left the Roman Church as the sole source of unity and culture in the West.

In the East a very different pattern of ecclesiastical organization emerged. Not only were there four great centers of Christian life within the Eastern Empire, but beyond the frontiers of the Roman world were the national Churches of Persia and Armenia. The cultural situation was also more complex in the East. Throughout the Western Empire, Latin had largely supplanted the local languages in pagan worship even before it was adopted as a liturgical language by the Church. But a foreign liturgical language could not be imposed on the more or less refined and diversified cultural groups in the East. Even in such centers of Hellenism as Antioch and Alexandria, Greek eventually gave way to the local Syriac and Coptic in the liturgy.

Developing according to the ethnic and cultural exigencies of its own, non-Roman milieu, Eastern Catholicism directed its attention to the local Church as the prime reality of Church life. Emphasis on local autonomy, the role of the local bishop, the collegial aspect of the hierarchy, gave the East a flexibility that allowed it to absorb and contribute to local culture in a way never achieved in the West. And all these factors have had their effect on what we have called the Oriental "style" of Catholicism.

2. Oriental Religious Point of View

The Oriental Catholic’s religious point of view is as universal in essentials as the Westerner’s. But he is unwilling to associate this with the fruits of human organization, of law and order and uniformity. Tending to emphasize the mystery of the Church rather than its earthly form, he is less concerned with the disciplinary and administrative aspects of its life. He sees the Church not so much as a visible society headed by Christ, than as His theophany, a coming of the eternal into ‘time, an unfolding of the divine life through the deifying transformation of humanity in the worship and sacraments of Christ. Life in the Church is spoken of in terms of glory, light, vision, union, and transfiguration. The more juridical vocabulary of power, order, right, justice, sanction is less known to him.

3. Eastern and Western Devotional Attitudes

The devotional attitudes of Easterner and Westerner are in harmony with their views of the Church. The Westerner tends to emphasize the moral aspects of the sacramental and spiritual life, the strength received to aid him in his pilgrimage toward his final beatitude. Grace is seen as a principle of meritorious action, restoring to man the capacity for salutary works. The Oriental, however, sees man more as an imperfect similitude of God which grace perfects. His life in Christ is a progressive transfiguration into the likeness of God. Less is said of merit, satisfaction, beatitude, than of divinization, transfiguration, the transformation of man into the image of God.

4. Oriental Rite Is Closer to the People

The Oriental is not disturbed by the fact that his Rite is less widespread than another. His worship is meaningful to him because it is intimately his, not because it is also yours. That his religion, his worship, should be inextricably bound up with the history and life of his people, that he should worship God in a language that is the fruit of his own culture with a liturgy which preserved not only the faith but also the sense of national unity of his forefathers during dark days of oppression—this is what matters. That Italians and Irishmen do things differently does not surprise him. It is precisely what he would expect.

This intimate union of religion, nation, culture contains dangers, of course. But it has given the Eastern Christian a deep sense of responsibility for the Church. The election of a patriarch arouses his lively interest; the improper performance of the liturgy by his pastor would not be met with silence. His access to his bishop or patriarch is remarkably casual, and chanceries in the Middle East always seem to be overflowing with the laity, peasant and shopkeeper as well as dignitary, who have come to request a favor, protest a point, or offer their congratulations on a feast. Many of these laymen will be clerics in minor orders or even deacons. Ordained cantors or subdeacons at an early age, they continue their liturgical service in their parish church throughout their lives. On a Sunday morning in the Syrian or Chaldean churches of Iraq, it is most common to see a handful of laymen leave their families on entering the church and go into the sacristy to emerge vested in the robes of their order and chant by heart the office and Mass with an unaffected gusto.

EASTERN LITURGY

We could cite many more examples of the Eastern spirit, but the best way to reach -the living soul of a Church is through its liturgy. This is especially true of the East, where the intimate union of Rite with the religious culture and piety of the people has preserved the primitive centrality of the liturgy in the religious life of the Christian community. The present strenuous efforts in the West to forge once again the link between piety and the prayer of the Church highlight the ease with which the Oriental situates his spiritual life within the cadre of his liturgical prayer. For him the liturgy is not one of various spiritual duties; it is the central fact of Christian life, the supreme expression of his life in God. The purpose of God’s saving revelation is to render man capable of the life of God, and the liturgy is the privileged ground of this encounter. It is the place of theophany, where man is introduced into the divine life by participating in the mystery of redemption.

This patristic notion of Christian life as primarily sacramental, as a salutary encounter with the glorified Christ by participating in the mystery of Christ which is the liturgy, is common to both East and West. But the Eastern Churches have preserved it as a vital force in a way that is peculiarly their own. In the absence of the shocks of Western intellectual and religious history—Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment—the East has retained a unique loyalty to the Fathers, whose vital spirit still animates Eastern piety. Something of the spirit of the first age of Christianity with its unaffected joy in the Resurrection of the Lord is still enshrined in the liturgies of the East. And it was through the divine pedagogy of these liturgies, a tangible catechism of the divine economy, that the East held fast to Christianity throughout the long centuries of Mongol and Turkish oppression.

No one who has worshiped with Eastern Catholics can fail to sense the extraordinary hold that the recurring cycle of their liturgy has upon the piety of the people. No one who has stood for long hours in a crowded Russian church on Holy Saturday evening has awaited the Resurrection of the Lord in vain. While the body of the Savior lies in the center of the nave, the liturgical representation through psalm and prophecy of our Passover from death to life moves in crescendo to the moment of the Resurrection when the church, now alight with hundreds of flickering tapers, resounds with the cry of the priest: "Khristos voskrese!" "Christ is Risen!" And a world that is reliving the joy of its release from the bondage of sin and death exults: "Voistinnu voskreset" "In Truth He is Risen!" No one who has lived this can fail to realize that for the Eastern Christian the gospel is inseparably linked to the liturgical cycle of feasts and fasts that unfolds week after week in his parish church.

Sacredness and Mystery

What are some of the qualities of this liturgy so dear -to our brethren in ‘the East? Apart from the complexity and length of the services, and the magnificence of its ceremonial, the most striking aspect of the Byzantine liturgy is the atmosphere of sacredness and mystery which surrounds its every movement and communicates a sense of reverential awe. For the Byzantine-Rite Christian, as St. Germanus of Constantinople notes, even his humble parish church is "heaven on earth, the place where the God of heaven dwells and moves"; where man can "lay aside all earthly care," as the liturgy enjoins, to "welcome the King of the Universe." It is the heavenly sanctuary "where men and women, according to their capacity and desire, are caught up into the worship of the redeemed cosmos; where dogmas are no barren abstractions but hymns of exulting praise." (P. Hammond)

Historical reasons can be found to explain much of this spirit. By the end of the 4th century the piety of the Byzantine East, molded in the matrix of the great Christological disputes, had become impregnated with an overwhelming sense of the awesome divinity of Christ and the unsearchable transcendence of God. To participate in the holy mysteries became a fearsome thing; holy objects had to be hidden, viewed from afar. Gradually the simple and direct liturgical action of the early Church became an object of contemplation, an awesome vision, full of mystery, before which man prostrates himself in reverential fear.

While the Church in the West, involved in the practical struggle to maintain civilization and culture and to convert the barbarians, developed what we might call an incarnational spirit, attentive to the present problems of Christian life on earth, the genius of the East found expression in a more mystical point of view. There, as in the West, many non-theological factors fostered this evolution. The intimate union of Church and Empire in the East relegated much of the institutional, juridical aspect of Church life to the emperor. Thus the Church was free to develop an ecclesiology in which she appears not as a militant society of the faithful on earthly pilgrimage toward the heavenly goal, but as a manifestation of the eternal in time, an epiphany of the New Kingdom in its final consummation. The emphasis is vertical rather than horizontal: a view of the Church in depth rather than in extension.

Eastern Liturgy Viewed as a Participation in the Heavenly Liturgy

Consonant with this view of the Church as "paradise on earth," a view that the Greek Fathers loved to stress, the liturgy became an icon of the celestial liturgy described in the Epistle to the Hebrews and in the Apocalypse. The Westerner sees the Eucharistic cult more as a means of preparing the militant Christian to "fight the good fight" through the grace-giving mediatorship of the Incarnate Word. The Oriental looks to the liturgical community’s transfiguring participation in the eternally triumphant God-man’s Passover from death to life as a foreshadowing of the final divinization of God’s People in the Kingdom to come.

The spirit is not one of loving compassion for the suffering Mediator expiating our sins on the cross, but of glorifying adoration of the Heavenly Ruler of All in the renewal of His triumph over death. The Eucharistic liturgy is indeed the renewal of an historical occurrence, but the emphasis is not on the act in its historical perspective, not on what is being renewed, but on the gloriously triumphant renewal here and now. It is not so much the immolation of the cross and a sacramental communion with the immolated Victim, as a homage to the Victorious Lamb and a reception of His "Sacred and Heavenly Gifts." The Eucharistic dogma is the same in East and West; the emphases differ.

This view of the liturgy as a participation in the celestial worship of our glorified Heavenly King finds unmistakable expression in the Byzantine offertory rite of the Great Entrance, when the clergy bear the sacred offerings in procession from the altar of preparation to the altar of sacrifice. The Cherubic Hymn sung during the procession expresses the symbolism in which the whole cult is immersed, enjoining the faithful to associate themselves with the heavenly choirs and share in their eternal view:

Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity now put aside every earthly care, so that we may welcome the King of all who comes escorted by invisible hosts of angels. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Even more explicit, perhaps, is the ritual for the consecration of a church:

O Lord of heaven and earth, who with ineffable wisdom…has appointed the order of the priesthood on earth as a symbol of the angels’ service in heaven . . . fill with Your divine glory this temple erected to Your praise, and show forth the holy altar erected therein as the Holy of Holies, that we who stand before it, as before the dread throne of Your Kingdom, may serve You uncondemned.

This insistence on participation in the heavenly liturgy is not a sentimental evasion into the unreal, but a confession of faith in what is most real, our life in Christ. And the stress on the completion of our transfiguration after death gives a sense of triumph to our faith, which begins this process during life.

The Symbolism of Light

One of the most common themes used in the Byzantine liturgy to illustrate the transfiguring nature of our life in Christ is light. The Johannine theme of light, the light of the Lamb in the City of God (Apocalypse 21,22.26), pervades Oriental spirituality and mysticism. The life of the spirit is an illumination by this divine light; to see God by this light is to live in Him. St. Irenaeus wrote, "To see ‘the light is to be in the light and participate in its clarity; likewise to see God is to be in Him and participate in His life-giving splendor; thus those who see God participate in His life." This symbolism of light marks the rhythm of the hours in the Byzantine office, evoking in the faithful a nostalgia for the divine vision which they are allowed to glimpse symbolically here on earth. It is a refrain heard daily in the Eucharistic liturgy, in the hymn after Communion: "We have seen the true light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith worshiping the undivided Trinity that has saved us."

The patristic and liturgical texts that illustrate this theme of transformation in Christ are innumerable. In a moving passage of his Sermon on the Transfiguration, Anastasius of Sinai has our transfigured Lord say: "It is thus that the just shall shine at the resurrection, it is thus that they shall be glorified; into my condition they shall be transfigured, in this glory they shall be transformed, to this form, to this image, to this imprint, to this light and to this beatitude they shall be configured, and they shall reign with me, the Son of God." The liturgical tropes of the feast of the Transfiguration bear the same message:

You were transfigured on the mount, 0 Christ-God, revealing to Your disciples Your glory in so far as they could bear it. Let Your eternal light illumine us sinners too . . . O Light.giver, glory to You!

Come, let us climb up the mountain of the Lord into the house of our God and contemplate the glory of His Transfiguration; in its light let us acquire the light, and elevated by the Spirit let us hymn the consubstantial Trinity in every age.

Importance of the Resurrection in the East

But the liturgical texts, like the sermon of Anastasius, make clear that the glory of Thabor is but a sign of the Resurrection, a figure of the cosmic divinization that is to come:

Before Your crucifixion, 0 Lord, having taken Your disciples onto a high mountain, You were transfigured before them desiring to show them the radiance of the Resurrection.

For it is faith especially in the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection that renders effective the Byzantine liturgy’s confession of the reality of ‘the vision of God. It is difficult to communicate the importance of this mystery in the life of the East. Even in Holy Week, when the Great Fast lies heavy on the Church and the liturgy marks the lament and desolation of the death on the cross, the note of joy is heard:

Lament not for me, O Mother, when you behold in the tomb the Son whom, without seed, you conceived in your womb, for I shall rise again and glorify myself; and since I am God I will raise into unending glory those who with faith and love magnify you.

It has been said that the differences between Eastern and West. em spirituality can be summed up in the names given to the basilica that covers Golgotha and the tomb of Christ. To the Westerner it is "The Holy Sepulchre," but the East knows it as the "Anastasis,"

"The Resurrection." This much is certain, however: the whole life of the Byzantine East is a praise of the Risen Lord. In the Byzantine Rite the Pasch itself is preceded by ten weeks of preparation and followed by an uninterrupted eight-week feast. To this saving Passover all other mysteries point; in it they find their fulfillment. The offices of every Sunday in the year are dedicated to the celebration of the Resurrection. Every Saturday evening, during matins of the vigil, one of the eleven gospels of the Resurrect ion is proclaimed, followed by this hymn:

Having beheld the Resurrection of Christ, let us adore the Holy Lord Jesus, the only sinless one. Your cross do we adore, 0 Christ, and Your holy Resurrection we praise and glorify: for You are our God and we know no other besides You; it is Your name that we proclaim. Come all you faithful, let us adore Christ’s holy Resurrection. For lo, through the cross has joy come into all the world. Ever blessing the Lord, let us sing His Resurrection: for, having endured the cross for us, He has by His death trampled death.

These themes of the Byzantine liturgy—light, glory, paschal joy—rooted in the Resurrection, overlaying one another, tirelessly chanted day after day, enveloped in an atmosphere of the world to come, find their completion in the Eucharistic liturgy when the priest, having distributed the Eucharist to the people, adds the hope of the Parousia to his recital of the Resurrection hymn quoted above:

Shine, shine new Jerusalem. for the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. Now rejoice and be glad, O Sion. Come forth in splendor. 0 Pure Mother of God, for He whom you bore is risen. O Christ, great and holiest Passover! O Wisdom, Word and Power of God! Grant that we may receive You more perfectly in the day of Your eternal kingdom.

This is indeed the conclusion not only of the New Testament, but of our liturgical lives as well:

"I am the root and offspring of David, the high morning star" And the Spirit and the bride say, "Come!" He who testifies to these things says, "It is true, I come quickly!" Amen! Come Lord Jesus! (Apocalypse 22:16-21)

Worshiping in ‘this atmosphere of profuse symbolism through which the supernatural splendor of the inaccessible divine majesty is approached, the Eastern Christian witnesses the exaltation and sanctification of creation, the majestic appearance of God who enters him, sanctifies him, divinizes him through the transfiguring light of His heavenly grace. It is not only a matter of receiving the sacraments, but of living habitually within a liturgical atmosphere which stirs man in body and soul in order to transform him before a vision of spiritual beauty and joy.

Eastern Liturgical Approach

In tune with the spirit of his liturgy, the liturgical approach of the Byzantine Christian is less active than the Westerner’s. The Latin Mass, with the austere and pure simplicity of its setting, its clearly defined parts, the sobriety of gesture and ceremonial, the directness of expression, the concentrated structure of its prayers—all this clearly reflects the order and restraint of the Roman genius. So too, the liturgical approach of the Westerner manifests the same direct approach to Christian life. At Mass the Western Catholic unites his sufferings to the sacrifice of Christ. Even when receiving Communion he is conscious of the positive aspect, of doing a good act pleasing to God.

But the Easterner seems to find his liturgical consolation less in giving than in receiving. He does not offer his sufferings as a sacrifice united to that of Christ. He leaves them behind and is carried beyond them to heaven, to receive the food of angels for the nourishment of his life in God. This emphasis on the action of God is found even in the sacramental texts. In baptizing, for example, the priest says: "The servant of God (name) is baptized…" instead of the more positive "I baptize thee…"

One might object that such stress on the majesty and mystery of God must be somewhat forbidding to the faithful; that a passive approach in such a climate of symbolism and sacramentality can breed mere habit. Does not this profusion of externals entail the danger of stopping short at a sentimental feeling of communion with the divine that does not imply any real participation in the mystery nor have any direct influence on Christian life?

The problem is real, and the East has at times shown a tendency to ritualism and externalism, a tendency to educate the heart but not the mind and the will—but only when the East has been untrue to other, complementary aspects of its tradition. For the basic presupposition of this ritual and pictorial splendor is that the divine world it evokes is explicitly another world, the world beyond the senses, beyond death. It is a world as radically other as the world beyond our resurrection, and our only access to it now is through voluntary death to self.

St. John Climacus, seventh century abbot of the monastery on Sinai, provides us with many examples of the stern asceticism which the East demands. Step twenty-nine of his famous Ladder of Divine Ascent is "Concerning Heaven on Earth, or Godlike Dispassion and Perfection, and the Resurrection of the Soul before the General Resurrection"; but this is at the summit of the Ladder. To reach it we must first climb the bottom rungs: "Renunciation of the World," "Detachment," "Exile," "Blessed Obedience," "Painstaking and True Repentance," "Remembrance of Death…"

But the emphasis on man’s lowliness and unworthiness when faced with the unsearchable majesty of God might still be forbidding were it not for the deep Christianity of the Byzantine liturgical prayers. The glory of the Lord and His incomparable transcendence, the lowliness and sinfulness of man—these themes lead us to a deep sense of reverence and humility. "Lord have mercy!" is the congregation’s incessant refrain to the diaconal petitions. These sentiments find balance, however, in another constantly repeated theme: Christ is the Ruler of All to be sure; but He is also the divine philanthropist, the "lover of mankind" who poured Himself out for our salvation.

Not only in the silent prayers of the priest but also in the exclamations to which the people respond with their "Amen," this balance between glorification and tender love is a constantly alternating refrain.

For You are a good God and You love mankind, and we give glory to You…

Again and again we bow down before You and we beseech You. O gracious Lover of mankind…

To You 0 Lord and Lover of mankind we commend our whole life and hope…

Other Characteristics of Eastern Liturgy

Other characteristics of this liturgy worth noting are its realism and objectivity, the basic doctrinal character of its prayers, and the fact that it is liturgy, literally, in practice as well as in theory. Eastern piety has remained largely free from the historical developments that in other places have led at different periods to the highlighting of this or that relatively peripheral aspect of Christian devotional life. Consequently, the East’s devotional storehouse has remained more or less uncluttered; its piety is still focused almost exclusively on the fundamental truths of the faith. And these truths do not remain hidden away in precious texts unheard by the congregation. They are proclaimed to the people unceasingly, day after day: God is Triune; He has sent us His Son and we have been saved; death has been conquered by the Resurrection. Only a very obtuse Christian could sing aloud the famous Monogenes every Sunday of his life and lack a sense of what Christianity means:

Byzantine Art and Architecture—Liturgical and Hierarchical Themes

As we might expect, this spirit of profound humility and adoration, of paschal triumph, of participation in the divinizing mysteries of the Eternal King, extends to the Byzantine liturgical setting as well as to the texts and rubrics of the rites themselves. The structure, arrangement and decoration of the Byzantine church building are flooded with the splendors of the heavenly world. Unlike the soaring cathedrals of the West, the Byzantine church from without seems a stolid, geometrically compact mass of heavy masonry. We are unprepared for the vastness within. The ordered and ascending progression of arches and domes, increasing in volume as they approach the great central cupola, sky of its own self-contained universe, draws the worshiper forward and upward, but not beyond. The unbroken lines of apse and dome show forth a cosmos sufficient unto itself.

The flowing surfaces of the interior are so enveloped in the imagery of a decorative scheme that building and icon become one in evoking that vision of the other world, the Christian cosmos, around which the life of the Byzantine Rite revolves. From the central dome the image of Christ the Ruler of All dominates the whole scheme, giving unity to the two basic iconographic themes, the hierarchical and the liturgical. The movement of the hierarchical theme is vertical. It is the eternal view of God’s People and their salvation history, ascending from the present, worshiping community assembled in the nave up through the ranks of saints, prophets, patriarchs and apostles, to the Lord in the heavens attended by the heavenly choirs.

The liturgical theme, extending upward from the sanctuary, is united both artistically and theologically with the hierarchical. In fact it is only with the liturgical theme that the symbolism of the church comes alive, and a~5pears as more than an impressive but static embodiment of the cosmos as seen through the eyes of God. A link between the divine and created worlds was forged by Christ in the Covenant of His Blood, a covenant renewed in the Eucharistic liturgy and ratified by the "Amen" of God’s People.

This dynamic bond is expressed in both the disposition and iconography of the church. The enclosed sanctuary wherein the mysteries of the covenant are renewed is conceived as the link between heaven and earth. Behind and above the altar of sacrifice, on the wall of the central sanctuary apse, is depicted the "Communion of the Apostles," Christ the High Priest, surrounded by the angels, giving the Eucharist to the Twelve.

Over the altar, in the conch, is the Mother of God interceding in our behalf. With her is the Christ child, figure of the Incarnation that made this sacrificial intercession possible. Above this, at the summit of the arch, is the "Throne of Divine Judgement," where the sacrificial mediation intercedes before God. From the sanctuary, cycles of liturgical feasts are depicted in lateral bands of frescoes that extend around the walls of the church, binding the historical past into the salvific renewal of the present. Within this setting the liturgical community commemorates the mystery of its redemption in union with the Heavenly Church, and offers the mystery of Christ’s Covenant through the outstretched hands of His Mother, all made present in the sacramental surroundings of the iconographic scheme.

The appointments and spatial disposition of the Byzantine church also reflect the Eastern spirit of reverent awe. The great harrier of the iconostasis rises up before the sanctuary, holy of holies and throne of God. Through the doors of this altar screen none but the sacred ministers dare to pass. For the Oriental, the Latin’s claim to gaze on the Lord, to be admitted at any moment to His presence, is indeed an extraordinary one. In the East the throne must be viewed from afar.

But this sanctuary barrier that cuts off the altar from our view is not a hindrance to popular participation in the mysteries of the liturgy, but rather an aid, an aid to the Eastern spirit of worship. For Eastern devotion is aroused by concealment as well as by exposition, and the doors and veils of the iconostasis are not only to hide, but also to reveal. Understood in this way, the icon screen is a tangible witness to the mystery we live in the liturgy. It is not a barrier but a symbolic gateway into the Kingdom of Heaven.

O only begotten Son and Word of God, though You are immortal You condescended for our salvation to take flesh from the holy Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary and, without undergoing change, You became man. You were crucified, Christ God, by Your death trampling upon death, You who are one of the holy Trinity and are glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit save us!

True, enthusiasts have definitely overstated the case in their praise of popular participation in the Eastern liturgies; the picture is by no means as perfect as they would have us believe. Nevertheless, it can still be said that liturgy in the East has largely remained just that: leitourgia, the official and public worship performed by the whole of God’s People, each according to his rank. It is not something that is attended, but something that is done, by and for the whole gathering, without, however, any confusion between the respective roles of clergy and laity. As the public community act of the day, it takes place in the community assembly, once a day, on the one altar. If many priests wish to celebrate, they do so together. It is a time for communal prayer, communally expressed. Silence is the exception. There is a continuous dialogue between deacon and people, a dialogue of simple petitions for their basic needs; peace, mercy, salvation, health, protection. There is a continual ratification of the sacrificial work of the priest in the "Amen" to the doxologies that conclude the sacerdotal prayers. And the invitations to prayer exhort the people to unite themselves not only with the priest, but with one another as well:

And grant that we may with one mouth and one heart glorify and praise Your most noble and sublime name…Let us love one another, so that with one mind we may profess…

Even the iconostasis is a reminder of each one’s proper role in the communal worship. For the altar within the holy of holies is reserved almost exclusively for the strictly sacerdotal functions of the Eucharistic liturgy. And the deacon, link between the various orders in the church and leader of the people in their petitions and prayers, stands at the head of the congregation before the central doors of the iconostasis, "a body standing before men, but a mind knocking at the gates of heaven through prayer," in the lively image of St. John Climacus. These are but few examples of the actual and not merely symbolic realization in the Byzantine tradition that the community is not to be ignored during its worship.

Any adequate treatment of Eastern Catholicism would demand many more chapters: on the Mother of God, icons, monasticism, theology, the Jesus Prayer. But we have seen enough to perceive, inchoatively at least, the spirit of the Christian East.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EASTERN RITES

For the Catholic, Eastern and Western, the existence of Rites other than his own is a continuing witness to the true nature of his Church. We know from our catechism that "catholicity" is one of the essential marks of the Church, a characteristic Karl Adam has defined as the Church’s "essential aptitude for the whole of mankind." By her catholicity the Church is capable of restoring and unifying all things in Christ. But to do this, she must be adaptable to all the varied human material she must incorporate within herself, so that she may in turn incorporate all into Christ.

It is not enough, then, for the Church to be integral Christianity in essence. To fulfill her vocation she must strive always toward greater realization of this inner dynamism in the external manifestations of her life. She must strive to be a Christianity complete in its external expression, a Christianity in which every human variety finds its rightful place in the unity of truth and love.

Unfortunately, the overwhelmingly Western character of Catholicism for over 900 years makes it necessary for us to remind ourselves that variety within the Church is not only a fact, but that any other situation would be deplorable. There was a time not so long ago when some sort of proof for the universality of the Church was found in the false belief that, "Wherever a Catholic goes, he will feel at home when he enters a Catholic church because there he will find the familiar Mass celebrated in the common language of the Church." Not only is this untrue, but if it were true, it would be not the glorious thing we might have once imagined, but a chilling commentary on the narrowness we had imposed on the Body which Christ fashioned for all mankind. To impose one Rite on everyone does not render that Rite, or the Church, more universal. It only impoverishes the catholic expression of the Church’s life.

Of course, the Church ever remains the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ regardless of the greater or lesser perfection in the universality of her cultural forms. But we cannot rest content with that. The gifts of God are given to provoke our activity, not to justify our sloth. We cannot be indifferent, then, to Catholic traditions other than our own without diminishing the fullness of our Catholic life. Hence our attitude toward other expressions of our faith, even toward those not yet born, should be one of need, for the Church truly needs these expressions to manifest perfectly her inner self. Until the Church is enabled to express her unlimited appeal in a Chinese way, an African way, a Scandinavian way, this need will remain unsatisfied.

THE PROBLEM OF EASTERN CATHOLICISM TODAY

In the early centuries after Christ the catholic nature of the Church led to a marvelous variety in the visible life of the Church. Unfortunately, this broad comprehensive spirit of the early Church did not last, and diversity of Rite, once accepted as the most normal circumstance of Church life, became instead a problem. Both schism and ecclesiastical politics were behind this new source of tension. We cannot go into the long history of how East and West gradually drifted apart. We should observe, though, that one effect of the division of Christianity was the tendency to identify Rite with religion, or at least to see unity of Rite as the safer, more prudent state of affairs.

The breakup of East and West began in the 5th century, when the Christological disputes mingled with a liberal dose of anti-imperial politics led into schism the Churches of Armenia and Persia, and later Ethiopia, along with parts of the Churches of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. The members of the last three patriarchates who had remained faithful to Empire and Church eventually adopted the Byzantine Rite. With the break between the Byzantine Churches and Rome, the identification of Rite and religion became, with few exceptions, a fact. In the West this fact did not develop into a theory, but it did lead to a pragmatic policy of Latinization as a result of the one-sided development of Catholicism that the schism produced.

Cut off from the West by schism and Islam, the Churches of the East ultimately evolved into enclaves of national particularism in which Rite, faith, culture, and nationalism became a confused unity in the national Church as the one bastion of national and cultural independence. The West was more fortunate, for the Patriarch of the Latins was also in fact Vicar of Christ and visible head of the Church. Hence the schism left the West on the right side when division had become a fact. But the later evolution of the West had its unfortunate effects from which we still suffer today. With the loss of the East, the Latin Church became the Catholic Church by default, and without the counterbalance of the East it was inevitable that the future external development of Catholicism would be one-sided.

Hans Kung describes well the ultimate result of this progressive narrowing of the Church’s visible catholicity: "While the Church, like St. Paul, became Greek to the Greeks and barbarian to the barbarians, it has not been Arab to the Arabs, Negro to the Negroes, Indian to the Indians, nor Chinese to the Chinese." What he fails to add is that it also ceased in large part to be Greek to the Greeks. The Latin way of doing things became in fact the Catholic way, and although the Orientals who returned to unity preserved their ritual, they preserved little else for the simple reason that Catholics did not fully realize there was anything else.

With the predominance of the Latin world a fact of Church history, the Catholic Church came to appear not as a community of Churches united by their communion with each other and with the one head, the Vicar of Christ, but as a tightly organized, highly centralized European institution. In this context, the problem of reunion with the East sometimes appeared to be a question not of restoring communion with Churches in schism, but of absorbing them into the Patriarchate of the West.

The main reason for this lopsided development was schism. Had the East remained in the Church, perhaps none of this would have happened. In fact, if the union established at the Ecumenical Council of Florence in 1439 had lasted, the course of history would have changed. For the aim of this Council was to establish total reunion on a corporate basis with mutual respect for the rights and customs of all. But the East ultimately rejected the Union of Florence, and the trend was not reversed.

Since the rejection of the Florentine Union, the Holy See has re-established communion with members of every Eastern Church. In so doing, the Holy See solemnly committed itself to respect the ancient Catholic heritage of those Churches, and it was hoped that these groups would be the seed and first fruits of a future general reunion of the East. This hope, unfortunately, has never been fulfilled, because the way in which these groups have developed since returning to the Catholic Church has provided the non-Catholic East with a pattern of reunion little to its liking. For it must be frankly stated that the Orientals did not always find a congenial home within ‘the Catholic Church. They were often viewed with reservation and suspicion by ill-informed Catholics in spite of the strenuous efforts of more magnanimous men to aid and protect them.

Finding themselves clearly subordinate to the Latin majority, the Orientals were defenseless against the invasion of Latin ways and customs, and gradually many of them lost touch with the spirit of their own heritage. Often this was their own doing. They wished above all to be Catholic, and in a world in which this was often taken to mean "Latin," they eagerly imitated Latin practices, many of which were not attuned to their own, religious culture, to prove that they too were real Catholics. Often it resulted from the misguided actions of Latins. Lastly, we must not underestimate the enormous influence of simply belonging to a Church, which had become so totally Western. Had there never been a schism, Rites would have continued to influence one another. Schism made the process a one-way street.

"Uniatism"

The end-product of this history is what some writers rather contemptuously refer to as "Uniatism," a term used to describe the position in which many of our Oriental Catholics find themselves today. The meaning of the term, however, depends very much on one’s point of view.

For many Orthodox, "Oriental" and "Roman Catholic" are contradictory terms. The Catholic Church, in their view, is the Latin Church, the Patriarchate of the West, the Church of the Latin Rite. For the Pope to establish non-Latin Churches directly subject to him is an unacceptable extension of power beyond the limits of his own patriarchate. In setting up "Uniate" Churches, the Catholic Church is not striving for true ecumenical reunion but rather, by means of partial reunion, is proceeding by consecutive amputations to subject the East to the West and turn the Church into one enormous patriarchate subject to the power of Rome. In support of their attitude, the Orthodox point to the fact that Oriental Catholics have indeed failed to be completely faithful to the East. Reunion has not established a viable bond between the two Christianities of East and West, but has led to the partial Latinization and absorption of East by West.

This, then, is what many Orthodox comprehend by "Unia," from the Slavic neologism unija coined after the Union of Brest (1596) to label a union that in their minds was rather a submission, a surrender to Latinism, a sacrifice of one’s native religious heritage for an artificial unity. And the result of "Unia" is not Oriental Catholicism but "Uniatism," a superficial clinging to certain Oriental forms by people who are in fact simply Latins in spirit. To do this is to make empty and superficial use of a liturgy, which is the deepest expression of a spirit, they neither comprehend nor possess.

VOCATION OF ORIENTAL CATHOLICISM

But if this view is partisan and distorted, what is the reality of Oriental Catholicism today? What do the Oriental Catholics represent in their own eyes? The educated Oriental Catholic is well aware of what truth there is in the Orthodox accusations. For the trend toward Latinization has left much of the Catholic East stripped of its heritage. The Catholic West even today does not understand completely that besides liturgy many other treasures—spiritual, cultural, theological, canonical—are an integral part of our Oriental patrimony and must be preserved not as a concession to particularism, but for the benefit of the Universal Church.

Consequently, the Easterner must strive to live his role as a builder of Christian unity for his people. But in fulfilling his peculiar vocation of absolute loyalty to both Catholicism and the East, he finds himself like a split-personality, trying to be Catholic in a way Catholics do not understand, trying to be Oriental in a way the East will not yet accept.

But let us make no mistake here. The Oriental Catholic loves Christ’s Church and loves It as it is, not with a blind uncritical love, but with a love that corresponds to what Christ demands of us all; that we live in the union of His Body now, and as it is now; not as it might be after the Ecumenical Council; not as it might be in 100 years. That his life in Christ means a dying to self, he knows and accepts. He knows that the fundamental question is not one of faithfulness to East or West, but to Christ; and that it is far better to lose his culture and his Rite than to sacrifice the faith and unity God requires of him at the cost even of his blood.

But the Oriental Catholic true to his vocation cannot stop here. His presence within the Church must, by his fidelity to the East, be a witness of what is to come. As the Catholic Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV has pointed out, he can do this only if he accomplishes the twofold mission that history has left him in the Church today:

We must fight to insure that Latinism and Catholicism are no longer synonymous, that Catholicism remains open to every culture, every spirit, and every form of organization compatible with the unity of faith and of love. At the same time, by our example, we must force the Orthodox Church to recognize that a union . . . with the See of Peter can be achieved without their being compelled to give up Orthodoxy or any of the spiritual treasures of the apostolic and patristic East which is open toward the future no less than toward the past. If we remain faithful to this mission, we shall arrive at shaping and finding the kind of union that is acceptable to the East as well as to the West, a union that is neither pure autocephaly nor an absorption, in principle or in actual fact. but a sharing of the same faith, same sacraments, and same organic hierarchy, in a spirit of sincere respect for the spiritual heritage and organization proper to each Church, under the vigilance, both paternal and fraternal, of the successors of the One to Whom it was said:

"You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church."

The path is not an easy one. There are no easy answers to the problems faced by Oriental Catholicism as it moves to reintegrate its heritage into the life of the Church. The process has clearly begun and the Holy See has already done much by the reforms accomplished within the past few decades. And the process will continue, prudently, without fanaticism or rigid conservatism, and with due regard for souls.

CONCLUSION

"We lay a special injunction on you: convert the Latins," said Pius XI in 1934 to some newly ordained Oriental Catholic priests. Convert them, that is, to a love and esteem of the Catholic East. This has been our aim in this brief study—a presumptuous aim, perhaps, but one undertaken all the same with the blessing of the Holy See.

History itself is largely responsible for the errors of our ancestors, and there is no point in brooding over the past. But we can learn from it. Non-Catholics judge the Church of Christ by what they see, and it is our responsibility if what they see does not correspond to the essence within. Part of this essence is for the Church to be catholic, universal, the spiritual homeland of all mankind. What this means has been stated very frankly by Maximos IV:

We must be convinced that Christianity can never accomplish its mission in the world unless it is catholic; that is, universal, not only in principle but also in actual fact. If one cannot be Catholic unless he gives up his own liturgy, hierarchy, patristic traditions, history, hymnography, art, language, culture, and spiritual heritage, and adopts the rites, philosophical and theological thought, religious poetry, liturgical language, culture, and spirituality of a particular group, be it the best, then the Church is not a great gift of God to the whole world but a faction, however numerous, and a human institution subservient to the interests of one group. Such a Church could not be the true Church of Christ. In resisting, then, the Latinization of our institutions, we are not defending any petty parochial interests or an out-dated traditionalism; rather, we are aware of defending the vital interests of the apostolic Church, of remaining faithful to our mission, our vocation which we could not betray without betraying ourselves and disfiguring the message of Christ before our brethren.

By expanding our vision of Catholicism beyond the limits of our own particular tradition, we can give our fellow Catholics the sympathy and help they need to fulfill this difficult vocation. At the same time we will come to a truer appreciation of our Catholic faith that will enrich our own spiritual lives.

Rerum Novarum