www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Parish Life & Evangelization changing Rites becomming Byzantine

Huh - agreed - but surely the Calendar may interfere here ?

Anyway - why me - I ain't said a thing till now

Again Michael,
Following the truth is not a matter of "feeling" right but a matter of humble submission to the Author of Truth. "Not feelings of emotion"
Stephaons I

Brother Stephanos,

Thank you for your words of wisdom. I believe I have found the truth and emotion was not an issue. Please in your charity continue to pray for me.

Michael

Dear Celticson, may the Holy Spirit always guide your discernment and may you find peace of heart in your new home.

Dia duit.

Brother in Christ Diak,

Amin

Thank you.

Slainte Chugat!!

Michael

hello i have been in the rite change process for almost 6 months now. my letter of intent to change rites was sent to the eparchy about a month and a half ago at the moment. and my question is for anyone who has been in this situation or knows about it, if what ive explained sounds like everything is on correct pace. thanks

and also....what actually has to happen for the change of rite to be official?...is there a certificate or something? thank you.

Mate

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Im sure you've already hurd this, but make sure your changing rites for the right reasons. Not just as a negetive reaction to the currernt American/Protestantized Roman Catholic Church today. When you change rites your taking in every thing our theological view points, and our spirituality. God Bless

In Christ +
Daniel

What a fascinating conversation! As a recent, non-Slavic crossover, I am with the Administrator on this one. We visited many BC churches before joining a Ruthenian parish, and while we never encountered downright rudeness at times certain parishes seemed more like ethnic clubs than anything else. As a Celt who is proud of his ethnic heri-
tage, I am sympathetic to those who wish to continue their identity in worship. It does seem obvious to me, though, that such a project will not endure for many generations. True, a couple generations down the line, the assimilated may rediscover ethnic pride, but if the Irish are any indication, this is not likely to include a return to the ancestral faith. It is more likely that the future will include proud Ukranian and Romanian and Syrian neopagans who consider Christianity an abberation...
So, how to balance these two good things? I think my parish does a good job, it obviously is Eastern European and a little strange to a westerner like me, but not so much that it is off-putting.

I would change if there were a parish nearby. I've checked and the closest one is 2 hours away.

Get the lead out! More Eastern Catholic missions and parishes!!

Dear Eric,
Glory to Jesus Christ!

You indicate you are from Raleigh and are seeking a Byzantine Catholic Church closer than 2 hours.

What about Ss. Cyril and Methodius, 2510 Piney Plains Road, Cary, NC 27511, Phone: 919-851-9266?

Father Ron has a very vibrant (though small) parish and is excellent in working with young people.

Hope this helps,
Deacon El

Dear Eric,

Why don't you get ordained and start one yourself, Big Guy?

Alex

Wow, that's a pretty good assessment!

I think the best we can do for our future descendants is to build a healthy faith community now, that God willing will be there for those in future generations who will most definately need it. You are right when you say that they may not even identify with Christianity then.

Perhaps they will seek their roots, but as you say, seeking the true faith along with an ethnic identity is not a given. And if I might further add, intermarriage is a standard practice among acculterated North Americans.

A family goes from being French to French and German, then to French, German, Irish and Italian! One generation more could make that French, German , Irish, Italian PLUS Rusyn, Serbian, Czech and Swiss! So in four generations it is possible for my descendants to not even care that their surname is French or Rusyn or whatever. But they'll still be my descendants, and the church needs to be ready for them to come home to.

In Christ,
Michael

It strikes me as highly ironic that those who cling most tenaciously to a primarily ethnic concept of Church may end up in multi-ethnic parishes; as the numbers and vocations dwindle to unsustainable levels they may be forced to consolidate. Look around, most parishes we've visited have been disproportionatly composed of elderly parishoners. There are too few young families; those that are not assimilating and leaving tend [apparently] to contracept at the normal American rate. There are exceptions but that seems to be the trend. It is worrisome, and it would be nice for my kids to have more children in the parish.

THE COURAGE TO BE OURSELVES

"To our beloved children, the priests and faithful of the Melkite Church in the United States, peace in Christ our Lord, greetings and blessings.

OUR INCOMPARABLE PATRIMONY

The incomparably rich writings of our Fathers are the voice of your own ancestors in the faith. Their names are known throughout the Christian world - Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, the two Gregories, John Chrisostom, John of Damascus, and the rest. We alone can truly say that they are bones of our bones, flesh of our flesh: ours in the truest sense of the term. They lived in the lands of our origin and the riches of their inheritance is now the treasured possession of the entire Church. Still we are the most rightful heirs of their inestimable treasures, for we are their very descendants, sons of the same soil.

However true this may be, we do not live in the past, but in the present. Why must we exert so much energy to preserve the heritage of days long since past, we who are such a minority in American Catholicism? Since we live in the United States now, why do we not simply follow the majority of Catholics and become Latin? These questions are often heard and deserve answers.

We can do no better than recall the teaching of Vatican II which declared: ''History, tradition, and numerous ecclesiastical institutions manifest luminously how much the universal Church is indebted to the Eastern Churches. Therefore, ...all Eastern rite members should know that they can and should always preserve their lawful liturgical rites and their established way of life ... and should honor all these things with greatest fidelity.''

OUR MISSION TO ROMAN CATHOLICS

For a long time the principle of the superiority of the Roman rite, which had become general during the Middle Ages, prevailed in the West. The Latin tradition was considered the only true Catholic tradition, and this led to a certain fixedness among Catholics: the Latin way is the only way! Events of the succeeding centuries only served to heighten the feeling among Latin Catholics that to be Catholic one had to be Roman.

Vatican II put an end to this provincialist view of the Church once and for all. The Church cannot be identified, it stressed, with any one culture, nation, or form of civilization without contradicting that universality which is of the essence of the Gospel.

The existence of Eastern Churches as part of the Catholic family, although they have distinct customs and traditions in all areas of Church life, dramatically shows that to be Catholic one does not have to conform to the Roman model.

Indeed, the Roman Church, as the Council affirmed, has learned many lessons of late from the East in the fields of liturgy (use of the vernacular, Communion in both kinds, baptism by immersion), of Church order (collegiality, synodal government, the role of the deacon), and spirituality. In a very real sense, the Western Church ''needs'' a vibrant Eastern Church to complement its understanding of the Christian message.

ECUMENICAL VOCATION OF EASTERN CATHOLICS

By our fidelity to maintaining our patrimony, by our refusal to be assimilated, the Eastern Churches render a most precious service to Rome in still another area of Church life. Latinizing this small number of Easterners would not be a gain for Rome; rather it would block - perhaps forever - a union of the separated Churches of the East and West. It would be easy then for Orthodoxy to see that union with Rome leads surely to ecclesiastical assimilation.

Thus it is for the sake of ecumenism - to create a climate favorable to the union of the Churches - that the Eastern Catholic must remain faithful to his tradition. This providential vocation which is ours opens to the Church an unlimited perspective for preaching the Gospel to all peoples who, while they accept faith in Christ, must still remain themselves in this vast assembly of believers.

From what has been said above, it is easy for us to find our place in America's pluralistic societies with its varied Churches and religious groups. In the now famous words of the late Patriarch Maximos IV,

''We have, therefore, a two-fold mission to accomplish within the Catholic Church. We must fight to insure that latinism and Catholicism are not synonymous, that Catholicism remains open to every culture, every spirit, and every form of organization compatible with the unity of faith and love. At the same time, by our example, we must enable the Orthodox Church to recognize that a union with the great Church of the West, with the See of Peter, can be achieved without being compelled to give up Orthodoxy or any of the spiritual treasures of the apostolic and patristic East, which is opened toward the future no less to the past.''

We have not yet mentioned the principal dangers which threaten our communities and their mission to the Churches: the ghetto mentality and the assimilation process.

A DANGER TO THIS MISSION: THE GHETTO MENTALITY

In a ghetto life is closed in upon itself, operating only within itself, with its own ethnic and social clich�s. And the Parish lives upon the ethnic character of the community; when that character disappears, the community dies and the parish dies with it.

One day all our ethnic traits - language, folklore, customs - will have disappeared. Time itself is seeing to this. And so we can not think of our communities as ethnic parishes, primarily for the service of the immigrant or the ethnically oriented, unless we wish to assure the death of our community. Our Churches are not only for our own people but are also for any of our fellow Americans who are attracted to our traditions which show forth the beauty of the universal Church and the variety of its riches.

A SECOND DANGER: THE ASSIMILATION PROCESS

Without doubt we must be totally devoted to our American national culture. We must have an American life-style. We must be fully American in all things and at the same time we must preserve this authentic form of Christianity which is ours and which is not the Latin form. We must know that we have something to give, otherwise we have no reason to be. We must develop and maintain a religious tradition we know capable of enriching American life. Otherwise we would be unfaithful to our vocation.

It is often easier to get lost in the crowd than to affirm one's own personality. It takes more courage, character, and inner strength to lead our traditions to bear fruit than it takes to simply give them up. The obsession to be like everyone else pursues us to the innermost depths of our hearts. We recognize that our greatest temptation is always to slip into anonymity rather than to assume our responsibility within the Church. And so, while we opt for ethnic assimilation, we can never agree to spiritual assimilation.

One prime source of spiritual assimilation for Eastern Catholics has been the phenomenon known as 'latinization', the copying by Eastern Catholics of the theology, spiritual practices, and liturgical customs of the Latin Church. Latinization implies either the superiority of the Roman rite -the position denounced by Vatican II - or the desirability of the assimilation process, an opinion with which we cannot agree. Not only is it unnecessary to adopt the customs of the Latin rite to manifest one's Catholicism, it is an offense against the unity of the Church. As we have said above, to do this would be to betray our ecumenical mission and, in a real sense, to betray the Catholic Church.

For this reason many parishes are attempting to return to the practice of Eastern traditions in all their purity. This has often entailed redecoration of the churches and elimination of certain devotions on which many of the people had been brought up. In some places, our priests, attempting to follow the decree of the Council in this matter have been opposed by some of their parishioners. Other priests have been reluctant to move in this direction, as they feared that division and conflict would result. We should all know in this regard that a latinized Eastern Church cannot bear anything but false witness, as it seems to be living proof that Latinism and Catholicism are indeed one and the same thing.

To be open to others, to be able to take our rightful place on the American Church scene, we must start by being fully ourselves. It is only in our distinctiveness that we can make any kind of contribution to the larger society. It is only by being what we are that we retain a reason for existence at all.

GRATITUDE TO OUR FOREFATHERS

Immigrants from Western Europe to the United States had less to do than our fathers did to adapt themselves to the American life-style. The Easterner, on the other hand, found himself immersed in a far different world than that which he knew. The temptation was great to throw off his entire heritage and become what he was not. And so we remember with gratitude our fathers and grandfathers and the priests who accompanied them from the old country for the foundations we have in this immense continent. Those who followed them have also worked well, often building splendid churches with the assistance of the Latin hierarchy. Now we are in the age of the young, American-born priests. To them especially falls the task of perfecting the work begun before them. They are still too few in number, but we hope with confidence that their number will increase.

We cannot be grateful enough to those Roman Catholic bishops of this country who took the steps necessary to preserve our heritage while we had no hierarchy of our own on these shores. We think most of all of the late Cardinal Richard Cushing, undoubtedly the greatest benefactor of our church in the United States. Thanks to his apostolic openness and love, he worked for the establishment of our exarchate and generously endowed it with his psychological and financial support once it had been erected. For this reason we have directed that a solemn Liturgy be celebrated annually in our cathedral to perpetuate his memory.

TOWARD THE FUTURE

This is not the place to describe in detail the projects we are currently working on. We only list some here: a diocesan religious education program for both adults and youth, a unified text and musical setting for the Divine Liturgy to be followed by similar texts for the other services of the Church, such as the sacraments, a diocesan handbook which we will soon be happy to offer to the faithful and to the friends of our Church, a periodical which will also appear before long, and the general sharing with the faithful of our pastoral responsibility, as in parish councils and an active diaconate among other things.

Also high on our priority list are the concerns of youth. Without the participation of the young, we can be assured that all our work is in vain and that our communities will disappear. And so we look forward to implementing a diocesan youth program as well before long.

We also recognize that we are reaching only a small number of our faithful while the majority of them are unknown to us. Like the Good Shepherd concerned about the lost sheep, we ask ourselves what can be done for them. We are presently in the process of studying these situations and hope to provide for their pastoral care where possible.

With what joy, then, was it to hear Bishop Mark Hurley of Santa Rosa, California observe in a recent speech that ''in many of our dioceses Eastern Christians are without churches of their own. It is the duty of the Latin bishops to see that the venerable rites of the East are preserved.'' The bishop then called on the Eastern Catholic bishops in America to form parishes in these areas so that ''the example of the East may continue to instruct Western Catholics and that the true universality of the Catholic Church may be experienced.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Dear faithful, be united to one another in the love of Christ. Form one soul and one heart with your priests and with one another, for it is only by this union in love that God is truly glorified.

With these prayers and sentiments, dear faithful, we ask for you and your families the most abundant blessings of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Archbishop Joseph Tawil, of thrice blessed memory,
then Exarch, later first Eparch of the Diocese of Newton for the Byzantine Melkite Greek-Catholics in the U.S., Christmas, 1970