On 6 January 1996, the Holy See’s Congregation for the Eastern Churches issued an Instruction for Applying the Liturgical Prescriptions of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches.
The attractively printed, 96 page document seems, at first blush, to be a somewhat technical publication of interest only to liturgical and canonical specialists.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The prescriptions of this beautifully crafted document are revolutionary in their implications, They are another bold step forward by the Holy See in its quest for Church unity.
The first millennium of the Church’s life is a history of its spread throughout the ancient world and beyond, in Europe and in Asia. It also is a history of divisions, rooted in politics, rivalries, cultural differences, and misunderstandings.
During the second millennium, the Church spread throughout most of the world. The dark side of this period was the splintering of the Western Church and the attacks on Christianity in modern times. The bright side was the quest for the unity of the Church and new vitality in Church life everywhere.
During recent centuries many groups of Eastern Christians, separated from the Church of Rome, sought to establish full communion with the Holy See, even at the price of breaking away from their mother churches. Most of today’s Eastern Catholic Churches were born this way.
Over the years, these Eastern Catholic Churches began to adopt many of the rites, customs, traditions, and vesture of the Latin or Roman Church. In other words they, became “Latinized.”
From the Roman Catholic point of view, these churches seem thoroughly eastern. But from the Orthodox point of view, they are too absorbed and influenced by the West. In a way, they have become a third kind of church, a hybrid of East and West.
The major focus of this new Vatican document is to encourage the Eastern Catholic Churches to divest themselves of all western adaptations and to restore the ancient traditions of the Eastern Churches:
. . . the Eastern uniqueness . . . risks being compromised or even eliminated in the contact with the Latin Church, her institutions, her doctrinal elaboration, her liturgical practices, and her internal organization . . . In every effort of liturgical renewal . . . the practice of the Orthodox brethren should be taken into account, knowing it, respecting it and distancing from it as little as possible . . .
The Instruction lays the groundwork for a striking plan for the unity of the Church. The churches that broke with Orthodoxy for the sake of union with Rome must become instruments of union.
Firm in their communion with Rome, they must return to the fullness of their ancient traditions so that Eastern Churches not yet in full communion with Rome will see in them a genuine, uncompromised model of unity in diversity.
May the third be the millennium of unity!
(Published in
Catholic Near East, 22:4, July 1996)