www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Use of vernacular

I know I've been gone for a while but I had a question and thought about you guys so I figured I would drop in!

Do the Eastern Orthodox or Eastern Catholics use the vernacular in their Divine Liturgy? If so to what extent? By extent I don't particularly mean what proportion of the Liturgy, though it may be relevant, but what percentage of parishes do.

I realize that vernacular is a general term and doesn't mean English. That's why it is hard for me to answer on my own as I don't know which languages would be considered vernacular in any particular group.

In this country, most jurisdictions (OCA, AOC, ACROD and all the Greek Catholics) use English as the predominant language of the Liturgy, supplemented by the traditional language(s) of the particular Church, whether Slavonic, Greek or Arabic. A few Churches with large immigrant populations use the modern language of the home country, such as Ukrainian or Romanian. Some Churches (e.g., the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese) still use the traditional liturgical language, supplemented in some places (e.g., the readings and the homily) by the vernacular.

Great answer! Thanks Stuart!

I'd also add that it varies by parish as well. I'm most familiar with Greek and Antiochian/Melkite parishes: some of them use "old country language" completely; at the same time other parishes in the same eparchy will use mostly English. Your mileage will vary.

It may be not without interest to point out that the first vernacular Catholic liturgies in this country were Eastern. Byzantine-Melkite, in fact. Served by (then) Archimandrite Joseph Raya in Birmingham, AL. All hell broke loose! Go figure!

As I know from painful experience, it never pays to be too right too soon.

The Serbian Orthodox Church does use Modern Serbian.In my parish,I use Church Slavonic and English,while reading the Gospel in Serbian and English.The Creed is somestimes recited in Serbian besides English.

The UGCC uses modern Ukrainian in the Patriarchal cathedral--I have a recording of the Divine Liturgy celebrated there.

In my neighborhood, there are two Romanian Orthodox churches under OCA jurisdiction. The first, Holy Cross, celebrates the Liturgy in Slavonic and Romanian. Most of its second and third generation Romanian members, together with a number of non-Romanian converts, founded a daughter parish (Protection of the Most Holy Theotokos, AKA St. Mary's) in which the Liturgy is mostly celebrated in English with bits and pieces of Slavonic.

The local GOA church, St. Katherine's in Falls Church, celebrates mainly in Greek, with readings and homily replicated in English.

The OCA Cathedral of St. Nicholas still has a "Russian" priest and and "English" priest, celebrating two liturgies, one in English, the other in Slavonic.

The ROCOR Cathedral of St. John the Baptist seems to celebrate exclusively in Slavonic, or at least, whenever I go there, the liturgy is in Slavonic.

A ROMAINIAN Church is using Slavonic?One might expect this in Canada where there are a lot of Ukrainians and Romanians from Bukovina and often they overlap churchwise.Also,I believe that the OCA Cathedral in Washington has some services in Georgian as well.

In Romania, I attended Liturgy at several different churches. One celebrated exclusively in Romanian (there are a number of composers writing liturgical music in Romanian), several others exclusively in Slavonic, and a couple mixed and matched, to my utter confusion. Technically, Slavonic remains the liturgical language of the Romanian Orthodox Church. But I learned pretty quickly that each parish marches to the beat of its own drummer--or cantor, as the case may be.

St. Nicholas Cathedral has a Georgian choir, and Georgian chant is often mixed in with the Znamenny, but I have never heard of a Georgian Liturgy, unless it was for a special occasion (e.g., the Feast of St. Nino). There are only two Sunday Divine Liturgies there, one in Russian and one in English.

Actually, it seems the Romanian Church officially switched to Romanian in 1863. Nonetheless, I know Slavonic when I hear it, and wonder then, why at least two churches were celebrated exclusively in Slavonic--unless it is as Fr. Al said, and these two parishes had a high percentage of Slavs in their congregations.

Are there any Russian Orthodox parishes that celebrate liturgy in Russian? If not, why not?

I think the matter keeps being raised in the Synod, and keeps getting voted down--just like the Greeks refuse to allow English in the U.S. or demotic Greek in Greece.

Almost every introductory book that I've read on Eastern Orthodoxy states that the liturgy is done in the vernacular, making a comparision to how Latin was the dominant liturgical language in the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II. Well, it seems then that is not entirely correct.

In many places, it is. In some cases, the language used was the vernacular, but has not kept up, making the liturgy difficult but not impossible to understand (like, for instance, going to a production of Shakespeare). And in yet other cases, the liturgical language is just incomprehensible. But the trend in most Churches, in most places, is towards vernacular celebration.

When the Latins came to Moravia, expelling the Byzantine missionaries, they instituted the Mass in Latin, a language spoken by nobody in that country. When the Byzantines went to Bulgaria and the Kyivan Rus', they brought the Liturgy in Slavonic, a somewhat artificial language that was, nonetheless, comprehensible to most Slavic speaking peoples of that time. Over the centuries, Slavonic (closely related to Old Bulgarian) migrated into Russian, Ukrainian, Rusyn, Slovak, Czech and Serbo-Croatian, some of which are closer, others farther from the original.

The Russians like to maintain the conceit that every Russian can understand enough Slavonic to get through the Liturgy. The Greeks, for their part, like to think that every Greek knows enough liturgical Greek to get by. Why they insist on thinking so, against both the facts and the better judgment of their more enlightened hierarchs, I don't know.