Dear Rob,
You'll find all manner of views on this - from EC's who would put Latin Traditionalists to shame (we had one on the board here just recently!) and others who would put some Orthodox to shame . . .
Judging from the attitudes of most of the parishes I am familiar with (of the "Eastern" orientation), this has more to do with a "religious cultural" difference.
In other words, what the "Latins do" is "their way" and we "do it" another way.
After that, the strong suggestion is made that "we do it better" than the Latins . . .
And this is because of a number of reasons.
There is the EC who sees his or her Church as "superior" to the Latin Church - and especially nowadays with the Latin Novus Ordo liturgy. When Latin Traditionalists complain to us about the "Protestantization" of the Latin traditions, we sympathize and mutter under our breaths "there but for the Grace of God . . ."
Another "type" of EC would see the Latin traditions as "all right for the Latins" but "we do it better" because we have a stronger link to the Fathers and the ancient Church traditions prior to the split of 1054 AD.
So, given our ancient, unchanging ways, this is, in and of itself, the source of self-assured pride in a number of EC's. Whenever a very Eastern priest wants to bring in an Orthodox tradition that we've not seen before, he will say, "Well, EVEN the Latins used to . . ." And that means that if EVEN they used to do this (before they went all over the place liturgically), then this is something we should look into adopting ourselves . . .
There are those who define their ECism in a negative way, in terms of a general critique of everything the Latin Church does - this stops short of calling it "heretical" but everything else that is negative.
So Latin kneeling is either a recent Latin or Basilian new (and therefore "wrong") initiative that we shouldn't be aping for that reason.
So who we are and what we do is the opposite of who the Latins are and what they do.
When we use the Filioque, those parishes that do, (and their name is legion), this is defended not as a Latinization, but as something that our own church brought in by itself (which is true).
And that makes it "ours" without reference to what the Latins do ("The Latins only use the real Creed on Sundays - they hardly know the significance of the Nicene Creed anyway").
The same is true about a number of Western devotions that have a "paraliturgical" status in our UGCC.
In the Ukrainian Catholic Church, special care is taken to interpret various traditions against the backdrop of her two historic enemies - the Russian Orthodox Church and the Polish Catholic Church.
As has been shown, our peculiar way of commemorating the Pope in our liturgy is a direct imitation of the way the Patriarchs of Constantinople and of Moscow are commemorated. But, no matter, try to even raise the issue of returning to a more ancient (and more reasonable) way of commemorating him, then so many get their noses out of joint.
The Filioque itself was forced on the Ruthenian Greek-Catholics after the Union of Brest - with RC soldiers sent to churches to listen to the singing of the Creed to ensure compliance.
Our early fathers of that Union, refusing to change the ancient tradition pertaining to the Nicene Creed, added a word that resembled the word for "Filioque" in Slavonic.
The words for Filioque would be "I Syna" (and the Son), but they said, "Istynno" (or "truly") i.e. "Who proceeds from the Father truly . . ."
Over time, the Filioque became mandatory under the Ruthenian Catholic bishops (i.e. Ukrainian and Belarusyan).
Since the EC Churches of Eastern Europe had such a close connection (as with all EC churches) to the national culture of the people, all of their traditions developed an unchanging aura.
Thus, to want to remove the Filioque is something that could be seen, especially in E. Europe, as a kind of "Orthodoxization" (and therefore, Russification) by the back door.
There were times when the ROC, with the help of the Tsarist army, would unite EC areas with itself.
The first thing it did as part of a slow process of achieving this was to announced a "program of Easternization and de-Latinization" of the EC churches.
When this occurred and various Latin traditions were stripped away (including the Filioque), then the next step was inevitable - formal unity with the ROC and the severing of ties with Rome.
However, in 1946, the reverse was true - when the UGCC in Ukraine was obliged to sever its ties with Rome (many tanks to the Russian army), the Orthodox Church didn't really care about the Latin devotions the area hung on to.
To this day, such devotions as the Stations of the Cross, the Sacred Heart, the Monstrance, and the Rosary, are popular not only in the newly-resurrected UGCC there, but also in the Orthodox churches of western Ukraine and elsewhere.
Alex
