www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology What was the very first rite of the Catholic Church?

What was the very first rite of the Catholic Church? Was it the Maronite Rite, Roman Rite, Byzantine Rite etc.


God Bless!

Welcome to the forum!!

Since there are so many problems in your question, as stated, for me to begin to address, I will let our brethren here answer you.

Bob
Moderator

The question is meaningless. None of the extant rites of the Church resembles at all the liturgy of the primitive Church, though the commonality of certain elements across all rites shows the basic shape and content of the primitive liturgy. It is generally agreed that the Assyrian Anaphora of Addai and Mari is the oldest of the liturgies that presently remains in common use.

But, as Father Robert Taft has said, all the ancient liturgies are mongrels, with borrowings and adaptations from many sources.

I would give a very unconventional answer; that is the "Apostolic Rite." It could also be called the "Judeo-Christian rite." This is the rituals, traditions and customs of the very early Church that you read in the first eight chapters of Acts of the Apostles.

As we know the Holy Spirit guides the Church as its needs change so there developed other rites and, God willing, there will be future rites that aren't yet developed.

Fr Deacon Paul

There were probably some minor differences in Rome and in Constantinople--I believe, primarily in language (Latin vs. Greek)...From what I have read, so much was the same in the beginning (first official centuries--3rd and onwards--of the Church)but over the centuries of the unified Church, due to distance, culture and lack of easy communication, different traditions, for whatever reasons that were practical, evolved...such as the type of bread used for Communion.

Historians and liturgists tend not to think of a normative "apostolic" liturgy, in large part because, in what was a charismatic movement, almost everything was extemporized. The celebrant was responsible for his consecratory prayer, and these varied widely. Only with the expansion of the Church did the need for some degree of uniformity and guarantee of orthodoxy lead to the formalization of the liturgy.

Constantinople had not distinctive liturgical rite prior to the fifth century (see both Schulz and Taft); it initially use a variant of the Antiochian rite, with the Anaphora of St. Basil derived from the Cappodocian Anaphora of the Holy Apostles, while the Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom was derived from the Anaphora of Antioch (that Chrysostom is an abridgment of Basil is now definitively debunked). Later, the Constantinopolitan rite took on board many elements of Byzantine imperial ceremonial, then monastic elements from the Monastery of St. John in Studios of Constantinople, and finally, elements of Sabaite monastic usage from Jerusalem; the whole did not finalize until the 13th century.

The Roman rite is not known prior to its translation into Latin at the end of the 4th century. What is most noteworthy about it is it had only one anaphora, the Roman Canon, though that had multiple prefaces. Also, the responses of the people tended to be terse and aphoristic, because, at the time that the Old Roman rite reached maturity, Latin was already a dying tongue. Moreover, there was a distinct difference between the kind of antiquarian, neoclassical Latin written by the Roman aristocracy who were finally flooding into the Church, and the "vulgate" spoken by the masses, already slouching into proto-Italian, proto-French, proto-Spanish, etc. So the responses had to be kept short and pithy, in order that the people might remember them.

This liturgy died out in Rome during the 9th century, a period of decadence in the papacy, but it had been carried north of the Alps by the Carolingians, who loved all things Roman. Franco-Germanic nobles, however, found it dull and boring, and they livened it up by importing elements from the more prolix Gallic rite (itself highly easternized by the close relationship between Lyons and Asia). The result was a hybrid Romano-Frankish rite that was carried back to Rome by the reformist German Popes of the 10th-11th centuries. This then became the basis for most of the medieval Western liturgies, of which the Tridentine rite was a canonization.

You have a good point Stuart. One could consider the first rite of the Church to be Charismatic.

Which is a fancy way of saying they all winged it.

Now we dot every I and cross every t and we are shrinking. They were winging it and grew. Hmmmm.

But they weren't "winging it" in a totally unstructured prayer service way though, right? There was a basic outline of the worship...

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Dave,

Yes, you're correct. They retained the Jewish ritual of reading Scripture and most certainly celebrated the commanded Consecration and the Agape meal. Most likely there were informal litanies, speaking in tongues,prophecies and healing according to need and the abilities of the host household.

Kinda sounds like a rite to me with no need for it to be published and promulgated.