www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Italian media speculates: Vatican will announce massive reception

Some short answer about the situation in Italy.
The Ambrosian Rite is simply a liturgical (rubbrical) rite, not an expression of a suis iuris Church, nor of an not-territorial ordinariate, thus it is a non-sense to speak of any jurisdictional structures as parishes out of the territory. (also the Ambrosian rite cannot be related to any separated ethnic gruop). Of course Ambrosian Rite can be used also out of the native territory when there are gatherings of Ambrosian faithfuls, as in pelligrinages.

For this reaseon, Rome has given more to the ex-Anglicans, who anyway are part of the West Church, than to any other Western Church Rite..

I don't know about the Gallican rite, but the Ambrosian on is used by more than 3 million people, that is more than many Easter Catholic Churches.

We Ambrosians never were discriminations in the past by other Latins (thanks also to people like St Charles Borromeo, Pius XI, Paul VI)

About migration of Eastern Catholics in Italy, in the last ten years we are facing a huge immigration from East Europe, particularly from Romania and Ukraina. Many immigrants are Eastern Catholics. The Latin dioceses in Italy are very helpful to help the Eastern Catholics priests (usually married) that works in Italy: they are given spaces and churches and support by the parishes, and urged to celebrate in Byzantine rite and possibly to establish a congregation.
So I cannot immagine any obstacle to a full collaboration also with the ex-Anglicans: we are n the XXI century, not in the XIX century

I've heard this before, and was wondering where this canon is. Does anyone have a reference?

This is rubbish! It would seem to me that if this is indeed the case that the Eastern Catholic Churches should just do an end run around Rome and ignore them. It is one thing to be in union with Rome but an entirely different matter to be subjugated to them.

Einar

Pretty much we do. However, the canon is still there, in the CCEO, and it does, from time to time, become an issue between our bishops and the Latin bishops.

antv:

When Stuart speaks, he is relating the experience of the Eastern Catholic Churches in the United States. When you read the official history of the Orthodox Church in America, there is page after page of parishes persecuted actively by Latin bishops. There are still situations that unofficially go on in this country. Latin bishops are hostile to their Eastern brethren in many cases and the Latin clergy have a distain for our Eastern Catholic brethren. Many of us here have had personal experience of these things. May I suggest that you understand that your experience in Italy is not the norm in many palces, especially in the United States about which place the statements made refer.



So what you're saying is that you speak of something entirely different from what Stuart is speaking. Your comparison is no comparison at all.



There are many who would argue that the concept of a multi-national Western Church ought to be a family of Churches, each able to have its own expression--thus the Gallican, the Sarum (England), etc. But this also puts the Western Church into a model that is more like that of the Eastern Churches. What we are here on this forum to learn is how to see the world as our Eastern brethren do, how their history conditions their view, and how they view those of us from a Western background.

BOB

In the code of canons for eastern churches says in canon 901, "If non-Catholics, who do not belong to an Eastern Church, are received into the Catholic Church, the norms given above are to be observed with the necessary adaptations, provided they have been validly baptized." This seems to imply that non- eastern-non-Catholics(protestents) can be recieved in to an Eastern Catholic Church.

Aside from the Mozarabic "Rite" (which is a form of the Gallican Liturgy) the only public, regular celebrations of the Gallican Liturgy are to be found in certain Orthodox groups in Europe - in Paris try the Church of Saint-Irenee, Eglise Catholique-Orthodoxe de France. They have done some quite interesting work.

Fr. Serge

But Canon 35 says:


And this has been taken to mean that Protestants, being Western Christians, should be received into the Latin Church. This was pointed out by no less than +Patriarch Maximos V as technically making evangelization impossible in Western lands. For the most part, the canon has been scrupulously ignored by all Eastern Catholic hierarchs.

My wife and I were both raised as Protestants, we were received into the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh. I am not subject to Latin Church's Code of Canon Law, but the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches.

Because we choose to ignore the canons that Rome imposed upon us (Canon 35 is from the CCEO). By the letter of the law, you should have been received into the Latin Church. But, recognizing that this would mean abandoning effective evangelization condemning the Eastern Catholic Churches to perpetual ghettoization, our hierarchs openly defy Rome.

This was covered more than a decade ago in the pages of Eastern Churches Journal.

Many people that would now be called protestants simply pick up various christian materials (mainly the bible) and read them and come up with things on their own. Would they really in any way belong to the Latin Church?

Didymus and CT,

As Stuart has pointed out, you are arguing with the choir. No one says that we agree with the interpretation that has been placed on Canon 35 of the CCEO, but it exists (albeit it is frequently not observed). One can argue that it is a counterpart (for benefit of the Latins) to the 'protection' that was so often invoked against the Latins (and as frequently ignored) when they would steal sheep from the Eastern and Oriental Churches.

Many years,

Neil

Apart from typical editions of the Missal and from general Roman calendar there always have been regional Missals and regional calendars. We use a Missal expressly named "for Polish dioceses", and Polish dioceses have Polish saints and feasts in the calendar.

The history of the Latin Church in the United States is unique. The U.S. was, from the beginning, an overwhelmingly Protestant country, in which Catholics were a rather despised minority suspected of divided loyalties. The situation grew worse with the influx of Irish immigrants, followed shortly thereafter by Eastern European and Italian immigrants, so that anti-Catholicism became aligned with nativism.

From the late 19th century, American Catholic bishops (overwhelmingly Irish in origin and spiritual formation) embarked upon a concerted program that would (a) fully integrate Catholics into American society, while (b) retaining their unique Catholic identity. This program had two main elements. First, to demonstrate Catholic "Americanism" by injecting Catholics into all aspects of American civic life; Catholics would be "good" Americans, which often manifested itself in a kind of hyper-patriotism. Second, the spiritual life of Catholics would be carefully monitored and controlled, and a uniform type of Catholicism would be imposed through catechesis in the pulpit as well as the formation of parochial schools (the emergence of the U.S. public school system was largely a reaction against the potential of these "Romanizing" schools; some states passed laws prohibiting parochial schools--the Church went to court, and won on that). Because the Bishops were Irish, as at the time were most of the American Catholics, the Catholic Church in America took on a distinctly Irish flavor.

There certainly were ethnic parishes--Italian, Polish, Czech, German, French (in New England), Hispanic (in the Southwest), but (with the exception of the last) these were more tolerated than encouraged. The bishops' tolerance of Eastern European Catholics (even of the Latin variety) was quite limited. Though ethnic parishes had to be allowed as long as there were strongly ethnic neighborhoods (wherein the parish was the center of community life), there was tremendous pressure to conform, and many unique ethnic practices were suppressed as not being "really Catholic".

But homogenization did not really begin in earnest until after World War II, when the old neighborhoods began to break apart and people moved to the suburbs. Ironically, many priests and bishops took advantage of Vatican II to suppress remaining ethnic parishes--despite Vatican II's emphasis on "inculturation". Thus, out in north Texas, there was an attempt to eliminate the use of Czech music and language in the large Czech community, which was strongly resisted by the people there. It only succeeded when the Czech community itself dispersed, to be displaced by incoming Hispanics.

Given the hostility of the American bishops to any sort of variety in Roman Catholicism, their response to the arrival of the Greek Catholics should have been expected (that Latin bishops in Poland only recently tried to force the removal of married Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests in parishes that had been Ukrainian for centuries shows the attitude is not limited to America).

I have spoken to many Anglo-Catholic in TAC and other groups, as well as to a number of Latin priests, laymen and scholars. All agree that American Catholic bishops to date have shown no enthusiasm for the Anglican Use Dispensation. They don't want an influx of liturgically and theologically conservative people bringing in a variant Mass. Most of them don't even want celebration of the Tridentine Mass, and do so only under duress. It is my belief that Anglican Personal Ordinariates are likely to encounter the same sort of "malicious compliance" experienced by Roman Catholic traditionalists who want to celebrate the Tridentine rite.

The analysis that "Irish" hierarchs in the USA were responsible for the problems of Greek-Catholics, ethnic parishes, and so forth fails to understand the hierarchs of the period. These men couldn't have cared less about the Irish, Ireland, or anything similar - the strong influence of the "Americanist" movement was leading to the effort to develop a purely "American" model of Catholicism, which had no room for diversity, pluralism, or encouragement of any tradition perceived as "un-American" (sound familiar?).

The infamous Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, Minnesota, did, of course, bitterly oppose the Greek-Catholic presence; of this we are all only too well aware. He also terribly abused the Irish-speaking Catholic immigrants from Connemara! Among the Irish, the memory of what this deplorable man did has not died.

One still, to this day, finds a strenuous opposition to liturgical pluralism in the US hierarchy - and it isn't just the Extraordinary Form, the Eastern Liturgies, or the Anglican Use that they don't want. Incredible as this may sound, there have been and still are strong efforts to inhibit the celebration of Mass in Latin according to the Missal of Pope Paul VI.

Plus ca change . . .

Fr. Serge