www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Parish Life & Evangelization We need an Eastern Catholic website!

We need a website were people can come and get information about Eastern Catholicism. Not a message board but something that has articles about the faith and the daily life of Eastern Catholics.

Anyone interested to join this worthy cause?

Just which type of Eastern Catholic would get to determine what constitutes the faith and daily life of Eastern Catholics?

Generally you can go to the (arch)eparchy website and view their newspaper. Sometimes they load as a .pdf file and it may take a few minutes.
The periodicals range mostly from bi-weekly to monthly. The links to eparchy websites are on byzcath.org homepage, under "resources." There is a lot of good info throughout the website. Go ahead and browse the dropdown menues....you'll be impressed.

Honestly, I like all the digging I've done, here and there. Then again, not everyone would welcome this style of learning.

One who wants to evangelize.

I think evangelization on the internet is minimal compared to what one can do by just having a stall of Eastern Icons and books on a busy Saturday up the town.

I think we need multiple parishes set up in the west. Internet I think can only really lead one who is already interested and internet causes isolation too. Evagelization works better when we come together in a genuine setting as opposed to a virtual one.

We should take any avenue available for evangelization. It shouldn't be a "this or this". Why can't we have a website and do street evangelization?

Precisely. What do we evangelize? If it were me, I would be selling the Byzantine Orthodox Tradition in communion with the Church of Rome. Other Greek Catholics would be selling something a bit different, don't you think? Unless and until we know who we are, our ability to attract others is going to be impeded by our own identity crisis.

I agree with Stuart. I find it counterproductive to attend an Eastern Catholic Church that is very little different from a Roman Catholic Church except for a few superficial differences. What's the point? We can't compete with Churches 10-20 times our size. We can't compete with Churches that have 20 times the income. It's time to be Orthodox in Communion with Rome.

Beside that I think we need good websites but I doubt that they will really evangelize much. On the other hand if we have no website or if it's done poorly we will find people looking past us. Evangelization is still best done face to face.

As Byzantine Christians, our principal means of evangelization is the Liturgy. "Come and see" has been our outreach since the beginning. Therefore, it is essential that (a) we recover our full liturgical patrimony, celebrating not just the Divine Liturgy but all the Divine Praises as completely and perfectly as possible; and (b) that we share this gift, this inestimable treasure with those who have yet to encounter it. You have friends, family, even casual acquaintances who do no know Christ or have fallen away from him; invite them to go to Liturgy with you, tell them to "Come and see". You might be surprised at how well this works.

I don't think the Eastern Catholic parishes are at a complete disadvantage because they are smaller. Of course, many parishes are much, much smaller than they ideally would like to be, but as a Roman Catholic who is registered in a huge parish (4,000+ families), I find the size of the Eastern Catholic parishes very appealing. In my Roman Catholic church, I have never met our parish priest and probably never will. However, at the Eastern Catholic church I attend, we are able to say hello and visit with our priest for a little while after the liturgy pretty much every Sunday. This is one of the reasons I prefer to go to him for confession than to my Roman Catholic parish. Overall, it appears to me that Eastern Catholics have the opportunity to receive better pastoral care. To me that's a huge advantage.

I can see your points, on the matter(s) you described. However, for as big as the Latin church I've been attending is, it was rather easy to approach the priest, and deacon, there. I think it just comes down to making yourself a familiar face. It may take a longer period of time than a much smaller parish, as found in Byzantine counterparts.

It also helps for a parish priest to be a mobile face, himself. The parish priest is really involved with getting to know the individual ministries, therein.

But other people have to know about us. Even Roman Catholics do not have a clue who we are. It ranges from "just ethnic parishes" to "Roman Catholics in everything but using Orthodox Liturgy". We need some organized info out there. How can people "come and see" if they do not even know we exist?

I'm with constantine on that one. We need a visible presence as well as a virtual one for the sake of info. But we already have byzcath.org so why do we really need anything else? Perhaps we need a byzcath.org for Europe and Asia? I would agree on that. But for evangelizing we need to make ourselves as visible as possible to the public. This visibility could be a Church erected in a parish community in the west in Ireland for example. Many probably think ''whats the point of erecting a Church in a place where no eastern Catholics are? isnt that a waste of money? meh...thats the way Judas Iscariot thought. We erect the parish and we wait on the arrival of many and go out to meet them in the streets, making a visible presence in the local news papers and having stalls on the streets and at all the big local Roman novenas and events or feast days or even on the secular days too.

So we do our bit and let the Lord do the rest.

When I wrote that we can't compete with RC parishes I meant that we SHOULD not. We don't need to. It is counterproductive to even try. Still, when attending several BC Churches I could swear I'm in a somewhat backward RC Church. It isn't pretty. Again, I agree with Stuart's prescription.