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Regarding the prostration at mass:

Mother has said on her live show that prostration is not for the laity. Her nuns do it because they are cloistered religious and members of a monastary. And please cite the documentation that FORBIDS them from prostrating.

Regarding the holding of hands. You are blowing Mother's position on this out of proportion. She has said repeatedly that it is not to be done because our true unity is demonstated by our reception of the eucharist. If Jesus is within you and me, we are TRULY united - in a much more real way than if we hold hands. By holding hands, the people are hinting that they are ignorant of their true source of unity.

And please explain why you think Mother is first "Roman" and then "Catholic." What in particular do you think is less Catholic than it should be?

enough of EWTN already!!!!!

I did not say that prostations were forbidden...just as hand holding is not forbidden by a liturgical text. I have no further comments on the network or the broadcast. Sorry.

Priests have a $1,000 price tag on their heads in Nigeria. The other day a priest from that nation was brutally tortured to death, including having his eyes gouged out by his torturers. A close friend of mine, Father Peter Akporogion from Nigeria is missing. The Church in China is being systematically liquidated and many are in prison and suffering terribly for their faith in Jesus Christ. Who cares whether or not people hold hands during the Liturgy? Praise God they are at the Liturgy!
PS. Please remember Father Peter in your holy prayers.
monk Silouan

Dear silouan,
It is indeed terrible, that the Church is being persecuted in Africa and China. We must all pray for the Lord to end the suffering of our brothers in Christ. Yet i would like to address your comment about holding hands during holy mass. The Pope has asked that we NOT hold hands during Mass, and so i believe we should care. I don't mean to offend you, but it is hard to hear Byzantine Catholics tell me i should not complain about the new mass, and about the abuses that happen therein. Remember, on sunday you Byzantines go off to your churches and enter liturgical splendor. While most latins must go to a modern liturgy and suffer through some of the worst abuses of the liturgy. In other words, it is easy for you not to be bothered by what happens in the modern mass, because you attend an ancient, reverent, liturgy. Would you not care if the innovations were happening in your rite of liturgy?
Please pray for us, Bro. Silouan.
In Christ Jesus,
Khaled

Dear Kahled,
Would you please cite the directive of the Holy Father. In your post you wrote:"The Pope has asked that we NOT hold hands during Mass". Many "directives" have come from the "Holy Father" which seem to have never really originated with him. Some people still maintain that the Pope is against receiving Communion in the hand. I was in St. Louis when he visited there last year and watched carefully as His Holiness distributed the Blessed Eucharist into the hands of the communicants. I have also been informed that many documents are signed by him and that he has no idea of what he is signing. His secretaries hand him stacks of papers for his signature and he just signs them, trusting in the veracity of his secretaries. That is absolute nonsense. Many "directives" come from all sorts of sources that are trying to advance their cause. I would like to see the document, bearing the signature of the Holy Father, which forbids holding hands during the Divine Liturgy or at any part of the Mass.
monk Silouan

Fr Silouan wrote:

>I was in St. Louis when he [the Pope] visited there last year and watched carefully as His Holiness distributed the Blessed Eucharist into the hands of the communicants.

I saw that on the TV news.

It's a long, long way to church union...

http://oldworldrus.com

[This message has been edited by Rusnak (edited 06-02-2000).]

>>I saw that on the TV news.
It's a long, long way to church union...<<

How does the custom of the Roman Church distributing Eucharist in the hand make union more difficult? This was the custom in the early Church where people often took the Eucharist home with them to communicate themselves during the week. Restricting the 'handling' to priests (and occasionally deacons) came about through both abuse and practicality. I don't see where one can justify that this is an issue keeping the two Churches apart.

>>>How does the custom of the Roman Church distributing Eucharist in the hand make union more difficult? This was the
custom in the early Church where people often took the Eucharist home with them to communicate themselves during
the week. Restricting the 'handling' to priests (and occasionally deacons) came about through both abuse and
practicality. I don't see where one can justify that this is an issue keeping the two Churches apart.<<<

By itself, reception of communion in the hand within the Latin Church is not sufficient to disrupt the ecumenical dialogue. It does, however, cause great scandal to the sensibilities of not only Orthodox, but also Byzantine Catholic faithful, who have the utmost reverence for the Sacrament. For that reason, the Latin exarchate in Greece has forbidden reception of communion in the hand by the laity, and I believe a similar prohibition is in place in Russia. Though by itself a very minor matter of useage, it is part of a pattern of liturgical praxis which cause Byzantine Christians to look askance at what goes on in the Latin Church.

Dear Monk Silouan,
I have no idea if the Pope actually wrote a statement, and where to find it if he did. But i'll answer your question with a question. Show me an official document put out by the Holy See that gives explicit permission, or even the option for the faithful to hand hold during holy mass? This question is more apropriate since hand holding appears no where in the direction of the liturgy,of either pre or post V II liturgies. In other words it's an un-sanctioned innovation. If you can find a letter from the Holy See giving hand holding an official "O.K.", i would really love to see it.

>>>Show me an official document put out by the Holy See that gives explicit permission, or even the option
for the faithful to hand hold during holy mass?<<<

Pardon me for saying this, but you guys are awfully anal about body posture. Is it your contention that everything that is not explicitly permitted is prohibited? Are parents not allowed to hold hands with their children? Husbands with the wives? What's the big tsimmis? No wonder authentic Byzantine worship gives so many Latins heartburn--everybody's all over the place doing whatever they feel like doing. Why is it, then, that the feeling of awe, reverence, and transcendance is maintained without the need for everyone to march in lockstep through the whole liturgy?

Thank you, Stuart, for your post, but my question was directed primarily to Rusnak since he feels that it is a real factor in the Orthodox / Catholic dialogue. I have never seen this documented as an issue in the dialogue and am curious about Rusnak's reasoning behind his objection.

I understand that those in the East might be offended by the practice of placing the Eucharist into the hands of the laity. For this reason alone the Latin Church should refrain from this custom in countries where Eastern Christians dominate. But that does not make the East correct since the custom of the laity taking the Eucharist home with them and 'handling' it was well established in the early Church both East and West. It seems to me that education and respect are the two factors needed here.

>>>I understand that those in the East might be offended by the practice of placing the Eucharist into the hands of the
laity. For this reason alone the Latin Church should refrain from this custom in countries where Eastern Christians
dominate. But that does not make the East correct since the custom of the laity taking the Eucharist home with them
and 'handling' it was well established in the early Church both East and West. It seems to me that education and
respect are the two factors needed here.<<<

If we want to be strictly correct, one of the canons, of Trullo, I believe, says that communion shall not be received other than from the hands of the priest, and not by any artificial implement. That would mean, among other things, that the Constantinopolitan method of administering via spoon is "wrong", as is the use of deacons as ministers of the sacrament, to say nothing at all of laymen. Thus, we come to one of the great hidden truths: the canons are meant to serve the Church, not the Church to serve the canons.

That said--the main problem with "communion in the hand" is that, in an era when establishing the nature of the Eucharist is increasingly difficult due to secular materialism, it tends to undermine the notion that something extraordinary happens during the Eucharistic liturgy. It "desacralizes" the sacrament, and for what that is worth, pastoral prudence would dictate that it be suppressed in favor of the older useage (properly stripped of all the various accretions which went with it, such as whether or not to chew, how many minutes it remains "it" after ingestion, and all the other baggage of magical sacramentalism.

All participants are reminded once again that the Byzantine Forum exists as a place for people to present ideas and engage in dialogue, especially dialogue among baptized Christians and most especially dialogue among Byzantine Christians. Those of us who are Byzantine Christians - both Catholic and Orthodox - should be ever conscious that we are but a small minority in America and throughout most of the world. Yet is this same world which we must convert to Jesus Christ! We should always keep in mind that our posts here may be the only witnesses of the Byzantine Christian Life that many who are not of our common patrimony may ever see (keep in mind that The Byzantine Forum has several thousand visitors each week). Reading through the threads on The Byzantine Forum lately one can only be saddened that we appear as a people who only fight with one another and are rude to our guests and disrespectful of both them and their Church Traditions. If this is the only witness of Jesus Christ we have to offer the world, then there is no reason for this forum to exist.

As the administrator of the Byzantine Forum, I offer my sincerest apologies to Khaled and all participants for allowing such disrespect on The Byzantine Forum. Khaled's question shows that he is the type of person who would seek to err on the side of caution and seek to know the mind of the Church before acting himself or judging others. I respect this and will leave this thread open only in case anyone wishes to post a documented response to his question or comment further on the original topic.

To Khaled:
If I have offended you in any way, I most humbly and sincerely beg your forgiveness. Many people have opinions as to what is important and what is not. What is really important is that we love! Saint John of the Cross tells us that "In the evening of our life, we will be judged on love!" If I have failed in this please forgive me, your brother. I do not pretend to be very intelligent and therefore I do not post very often. My gift to the Church is my life of prayer, as incomplete as that may be. Theologian I am not. Liturgist, I am not. I suffer deeply because the Church that I love suffers terribly from division and sin. I certainly contribute my share of sin. Maybe it would be well advised to re-read St. Paul's exortation to the Corinthians. This teaching is to us all, Byzantine, Orthodox, Roman, Protestant:
"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on it's own way; it is not irritable or resentful; love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
A good examination of conscience would suggest that we replace the word "love" in the above text with my own name. I do that and I tremble. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a sinner!
Enough preaching from an old man!
monk Silouan

Hello, all. I am an infrequent visitor to this forum, but I have found it generally informative.

The only thing I wanted to chime in with here, is to say that our family really enjoys some (not all, by any means) of the programming on EWTN. I was brought up Roman Catholic. My wife and mom-in-law are from St Petersburg; my wife was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church as a young teenager, and my mom-in-law is (as she puts it) half-Catholic, half-Orthodox, having a Polish mother and Russian father.

Though we do not know the hour when it may be completed, we are filled with joy at the thought of the Eastern and Western churches re-approaching unity.

May His peace be with you all, always � and especially when discussing differences, and discussing things which you hold close to your hearts.