The Twain Meet
By the Very Rev. Fr. Paul W.S.
Schneirla, Vicar General, Antiochian W. Rite Vicariate
…East is east and West is west
and never the twain shall meet… -- Kipling
Many of us were born
into a Christian world where traditional churches were using worship
services that had developed into tightly organized rituals over the
centuries. Believers frequently identified so intimately with the
familiar forms that the slightest, even inadvertent, variation from the
norm could provoke comment, even distress or a parish revolution. The
climate has changed both because of greater ease of travel and
communication and as the result of over a century of scholarly study of
liturgy, the discipline that investigates the
history and meaning of the inherited customs of worship.
Local Rites Evolve
The earliest Christian worship was evidently
extemporaneous but following a well-understood general pattern with the
result that the many surviving liturgics are broadly the same
in outline and intent. As the Church expanded over the known world, the
outward form of the Eucharist and other services took on local
characteristics of mood, language, music and ceremony and different rites
evolved. Probably the oldest to crystallize was the West Syrian usage
which lies behind the Byzantine, and the non-Chalcedonian Syrian,
the Coptic and Armenian were originally in use in the Orthodox Church.
But the anti-Chalcedonian movement of the fifth century and the
subsequent Arab Islamic domination of the ancient Patriarchates of
Antioch and Alexandria, while the Crusaders so reduced the number of
local Orthodox in Jerusalem that a Greek Patriarch of Antioch, Theodore
Balsamon (†1214) decreed that All the Churches of God must follow
the custom of New Rome (i.e. Constantinople) and celebrate the liturgy
according to the tradition of those great Church Fathers and beacons of
piety, SS John Chrysostom And Basil. So we Antiochians lost our
Syriac liturgy which still exists among the non-Chalcedonians and
Maronites but was replaced for us by the Greek rite. This later
followed the spread of the Orthodox Church to the north and across Asia
so that until today in many local variations, it continues as the
almost universal rite of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Except for a tiny foothold in southern Italy, the Greek
rite never replaced the local Western rites and when the Papacy fell
away from the Orthodox Church in the eleventh century, the Western
rites were lost to the Church for somewhat different reasons but just
as the Syrian, Armenian, Coptic and Nestorian (West Syrian) rites
continued only outside of the Church.
The Western Rite
Because the Western Roman Empire lacked the
centralization of Byzantium, a great many local rites developed in
Orthodox Western Europe. In the sixteenth century there were five
separate diocesan uses in England alone: Salisbury, Hereford,
Bangor, York and Lincoln, and whole families of rites evolved around
great cities, e.g. Milan, Braga, Lyons and a Mozarabic rite in Spain
under the Arab conquerors, as well as others for some religious orders.
When the Papacy convoked the Council of Trent to resist the Protestant
Reformation, any rite with a long history was allowed to survive, some
did so until the Second Vatican Council and some still survive, for
example, the particular rite of the Archdiocese of Milan (the Mozarabic
rite continues in one church in Spain as a sort of Antique).
If you have followed this far you know that rites
are local reflections of the faith and that no one of them is the
one and only. Only with the invention of printing did rites attain
uniformity.
Why an Orthodox Western Rite?
The Papacy, monolithic and highly centralized, never
lost the understanding that unity in faith and communion did not
require absolute uniformity in worship and discipline. Hence the Uniate
eastern churches: Armenian, Ukrainian and our cousins the Melkites,
&c. Substantially eastern in the worship, customs and discipline,
they differ from the Orthodox only in their allegiance to the Pope and
Roman doctrine. Any Church that claims to be the one, holy universal
Church of the Creed—as both Rome and Orthodoxy do—cannot be confined to
a limited local vision of Christianity. The problem with Uniates,
utterly anathema to many Orthodox, is not that they exist but the fact
that they were often used as a false front to proselytize Orthodox
faithful by unworthy means, either by civil persecution or by appealing
to the faithful in such a way as to produce rice Christians.
It was inevitable that sooner or later some western
converts would approach the Orthodox Church and ask to be permitted to
retain the rites used in the west before the break between Rome and
Constantinople. The likelihood was all the greater because in the past
it sometimes appeared that to become Orthodox one must also become a
Levantine or a Slav and not every Occidental is able to shed the
culture tic or she was born in and adopt an exotic one.
The first major approach was made in the late nineteenth
century by a Roman Catholic priest, John Joseph Overbeck, who revised
the Roman rite to conform to Orthodox standards, a fairly simple
operation at that time. His proposal was accepted by the Russian
Orthodox Holy Synod and he was encouraged and supported by interested
missionary-minded Russians, but by the time of his death in the first
decade of Twentieth Century, his movement had not succeeded and his
converts were absorbed into Byzantine communities.
At the turn of the ccntury, the only Orthodox bishop in
North America, the later Russian Patriarch Tikhon (Belavin) was
approached by a group of Episcopalians, who asked to be allowed to
continue the use of the American Book of Common Prayer rather
than the Byzantine rite. Bishop Tikhon petitioned the Holy Synod of
Moscow and a commission of theologians was directed to provide a
detailed examination and revision of the Prayer Book to be approved for
the converts (the report was printed in the Journal of the
Theological Academy of St. Petersburg, a summary in English was
printed in The Russian American Messenger, a critical
review by two Anglican scholars appeared as Tract XII of
the Alcuin Club and a fuller version with notes appeared in The
Orthodox Catholic Review, a publication of the Antiochian
Archdiocese).
Metropolitan Gerassimos (Messerah) of Beirut received a
Western Rite movement in England before World War I, and Metropolitan
Germanos (Shehadi), while resident in the United States, engaged in
negotiations to receive a Roman Catholic movement in Mexico in the
1920s. Neither of these projects resulted in a continuing community.
They are noticed here to demonstrate that an Orthodox Western Rite is
not a recent project.
Our present Western Rite Vicariate began with the return
of a few parishes of converts that had dropped out of our diocese in
the difficult days after World War I. It was approved by the late
Patriarch Alexander in and was finally received in the early 1950s.
There are presently some twenty centers. There are no invented
services: the parishes use either the form approved for Overbeck or for
Patriarch Tikhon, now a saint of the Church.
The laity are persons of traditional Orthodox Faith,
disillusioned by the progressive liberal stance of some mainline
traditional churches; that is, communities that have a fixed, historic
form of Worship. We do not mount a proselytizing program, but provide
an option for those who have already rejected changes in their former
denomination. Our stance is utterly different from the campaign that
tore the Uniates out of Orthodoxy.
With the current tendency of traditional Christian
churches to bless homosexual marriages, trash familiar worship
patterns, ordain women, tolerate the neglect of family values, deny
Biblical revelation and otherwise follow secular leadership, our
Western tern Rite has become the most successful missionary of the
Archdiocese. Its outreach is far different from that of the Evangelical
Movement which is directed at a very special audience.
In the last century there were cradle Orthodox who
viewed the Western Rite, not as the restoration of a long-lost part of
the Church, but as a dangerous intrusion. For them Overbeck wrote in
1866:
My dear Eastern friends, I conjure you not to
undervalue the difference of the Eastern and Western minds, and their
different forms of thinking and worshipping…it is a requisite of
paramount importance, not to lose the Western ground, not to attempt to
assimilate, extrinsically the Eastern and Western Orthodox Church.
Both, through having the same faith and fundamental constitution of the
Catholic Church, must keep their formal peculiarities, which have
become a part of their inmost life, and which cannot be changed like a
dress. Divine Providence formed the Western Church on the Western Mind;
therefore our Western form is inalienable from our Western minds. Our
difference from the East is only formal; but I venture to maintain that
often formal obstacles were a more serious bar to unity than even
material ones.
But the apostolate of the Western Rite is not alone a
means to make Orthodox truth available to those who lost it, or never
had it, and now want it. A major thrust is to witness to the claim of
Orthodoxy to be the unique representative of the early universal
Church, not a collection of local ethnic religions. It lifts our eyes
beyond our limited horizons to our mandate to bring all people to the
Church.
for more information see www.westernorthodox.com
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