Rites and wrongs.As a Greek Catholic Greek Catholic n. 1. A member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. 2. A member of a Uniat church. Noun 1. Greek Catholic - a member of the Greek Orthodox Church layman, I find James Morgan's letter [Correspondence, March 26] an altogether understandable Orthodox response to Jerry Ryan's "Back to the Future" [January 15]. However much an Orthodox Christian might be attracted to the ideal of the papacy, and however much he or she might admire the good intentions reflected in John Paul The name John Paul might refer to: Full name
Pope (590-604) who increased papal authority, enforced rules of life for the clergy, and sponsored many important missionary expeditions, notably that of Saint Augustine to Britain (596). . The sad story of my own Ukrainian Greek Catholic Particular Church offers little encouragement. Shunned by the Roman rite The liturgical rite of the Church of Rome is called the Roman Rite. The quite distinct term Latin Rite usually refers not to a liturgical rite but to the particular Church within the Roman Catholic Church that was sometimes referred to also as the Patriarchate of the West, hierarchy and clergy when they arrived in America, and stripped by Rome of their historical right to a married clergy, many Greek Catholics in this country were driven from communion with Rome. Even after the Ukranian Greek church emerged from the catacombs in this decade, Rome did not challenge the Polish hierarchy when it sought to restrict our right to a married clergy there. In Ukraine itself, Rome has limited the territorial jurisdiction of our archbishop-major to Western Ukraine, allowed Roman dioceses to be established in the east, and limited our church's presence there to an exarchate ex·arch 1 n. 1. A bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church ranking immediately below a patriarch. 2. The ruler of a province in the Byzantine Empire. . It is time for Rome to implement the eccelsiology so beautifully articulated in the pope's encyclicals. A concluding thought: It is clear from Morgan's letter that Catholics do not have a monopoly on the tactics of arguing from the standpoint of the ideal to which their church ought to aspire. A thoughtful examination of the life of the various Orthodox communities in this country suggests that it goes too far to claim that they have "survived the past millennium unscathed by the horrible battles and viruses afflicting af·flict tr.v. af·flict·ed, af·flict·ing, af·flicts To inflict grievous physical or mental suffering on. [Middle English afflighten, from afflight, the West." The tensions that surfaced during the recent visit of the Ecumenical Patriarch, divisions among the various communities rooted in their ethnic heritages and the politics of Eastern Europe, growing disparities in liturgical practice from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and parish to parish, all these suggest that the Holy Spirit still has much work to do within the Orthodox communion in this country. T.F. Stock Arlington, Va. |
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