Calls for greater recognition of Eastern Rite Catholic Churches

13 century debate between Eastern & Western Churches, Acre

Fr Robin Gibbons, Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain, has welcomed a recent statement by Cardinal Leonardo Sandri head of the Congregation for Eastern Churches in which he appealed for more support for the Eastern Rite Churches which are suffering persecution in their homelands and are now being scattered around the world.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council decree "Orientalium Ecclesiarum," which affirmed the richness of the Eastern churches within the Catholic communion, Cardinal Sandri said on 20 November: "Diversity at the centre of the Church is something that reflects a project of God."

He said, the Eastern churches had historically faced "several prejudices" in the Catholic communion, which "considered the Latin church and its 'rite' as the universal model." In addition, he said, because of a particular interpretation of the role of the Roman pontiff, "the rights and privileges of the patriarchs were worn thin or dropped." "

In fact, there was perhaps a consideration of Eastern Catholic Christianity as quaint folklore, sometimes not deeply understood and confused with the Orthodox Church," he wrote. However, the Second Vatican Council offered a new understanding of the Eastern churches and affirmed "the necessary diversity within the universal church," he said. It expressed "great esteem for their ways of governance, their canonical disciplines as regards priests -- including the married priesthood -- their piety, their ways of understanding the Christian mystery and their vision of the church," he wrote.

The Eastern churches were not, as previously understood, "caused by some historical contingency, but they exist by providential design," said Cardinal Sandri. "Diversity is an indicator of communion and almost the condition for its possibility, not its negation," he wrote. "It is diversity, owed to the Spirit, and expressed according to the cultural horizon of each people who has welcomed the Gospel."

Praising the "witness of courage and hope" of the martyred Eastern Catholic churches, the cardinal also noted the significant challenges faced by many Eastern churches today, as they minister in territories affected by war, political upheavals and humanitarian disasters.

Faced by these challenges, many Eastern Catholics have immigrated to countries where the Latin church is predominant, he said. In light of this migration, he said, the more numerous Catholic communities are called "to help Eastern Catholic churches in the diaspora preserve, love and transpose ... their religious traditions in new cultural contexts."

Fr Robin Gibbons commented: "It is timely that Cardinal Sandri draws attention to the needs and traditions of the Eastern Catholic Churches who, as he rightly says, have too often suffered from the 'prejudices' of the Latin Rite Catholics.

"In my own ministry here as a Melkite Greek Catholic priest in the UK, I have met with some very welcoming Catholics, interested and concerned that these churches retain their rightful traditions, but I have also met some real ignorance about them. It would be invidious to cite cases but they do include our children at a Catholic school being told by a teacher that our 'communion' was not valid because it was made with leavened bread!

"There is often some difficulty with fellow Catholics who are ignorant of our authentic practice of giving babies the full rites of Initiation including Chrismatio (Confirmation in the west) and Communion. This means we do not follow current Latin practice of splitting the sacraments, nor do we have First Communions and of course this is normally administered by a priest. Even our liturgical calendars are very different!

In recent years a number of us have been trying to bridge these gaps and help Latin Rite Catholics and others understand the deep theology, spirituality and liturgical traditions of these churches. I have been working to do this for a number of years.  We are fortunate in having the Centre for Eastern Christianity at Heythrop College which alongside other groups does much to advance knowledge of these ancient sister churches. The plight of Middle Eastern Christianity is bringing the history and persecution of many of those churches into the world arena, all of us who are Catholic need to learn and respect our sister churches."