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I don't see why an Easterner can't love and follow the first Apostle and still have respect shown to him.

Some Eastern Catholic clergy see their history as a progress from schism and spiritual stagnation into a life of discipline, renewal and restored religious practice in the Catholic communion. For this group, the adoption of certain Latin—they would say “Catholic”—devotions and liturgical uses is a sign of this new identity. Such attitudes reflect an interior erosion of the Eastern Christian consciousness, a “latinization of the heart” resulting from a formation insensitive to the true nature of the variety of traditions within the Catholic Church.

Others, while not denying their commitment to the Catholic communion nor underestimating the obvious spiritual benefits it has brought to their Churches, see themselves as Orthodox in communion with Rome, distinguished from their Orthodox Sister Churches in nothing but the fact of that communion and its doctrinal and ecclesial consequences. They see the Latinisms that have crept into their tradition as a loss of identity, an erosion of their heritage in favor of foreign customs with which they can in no way identify themselves. For some, latinization is a sign of their identity, for others its negation, and both are right, because they perceive themselves differently.

Underlying these issues, of course, is the more serious question of Rome’s credibility: is the Holy See to be believed in what it says about restoring the Eastern Catholic heritage? The morale of some of the younger Eastern Catholic clergy has of late been deeply affected by this cul-de-sac: they feel mandated to do one thing by the Holy See, and then are criticized or even disciplined by their bishop if they try to obey.

The problem, as usual, is one of leadership, without which the hesitant or reluctant have no one to follow. What is needed is not just discipline and obedience, but also clergy education loyal to the clear policy of the Church on this question, and prudent pastoral preparation. This is the only way out of the vicious cycle that has been created: the proposed reforms are resisted because the clergy and the people are not prepared to accept them—yet some Church leaders do little or nothing to prepare the people for a renewal that the leaders themselves do not understand or accept.

Although I cannot pretend to read minds, I think there are two main reasons behind this deep-rooted reluctance to welcome the clear and unambiguous policy of Rome in its program of liturgical restoration of the Eastern traditions: 1) the restoration seems a pointless archaism; 2) its opponents are convinced in their hearts that some of the practices proposed are not “Catholic”, and hence, not “right”. That this directly contradicts the teaching of the Holy See is an irony that does not seem to dawn on them.

The first objection is easily dispensed with. The orientation of Catholic liturgical renewal is never towards the past but toward present pastoral needs. Of course, the liturgical scholar studies the past, but the purpose of such historical research is not to discover the past—much less to imitate it—but to recover the integrity of the pristine tradition which the past may well have obscured. The aim is not to restore the past, but to overcome it. For history is not the past, but a genetic vision of the present, a present seen in continuity with its roots. It is precisely those who do not know their past who are incapable of true, organic change. They remain victims of the latest cliché, prisoners of present useage because they have no objective standard against which to measure it.

The proposed restoration, then, is not a blind imitation of a dead past, but an attempt, precisely, to free Eastern Catholics from a past in which, severed from the roots of their own tradition, they were deprived of any organic development and could conceive of growth only as sterile servility to their Latin confreres. Can one seriously propose this as a program to be preserved in our day?

Hence the irony of those critics of the Eastern Catholic liturgical restoration who accuse its promoters of fostering a return to the Middle Ages. As we shall see in the next section, it is precisely in the Middle Ages that the practices like infant communion in the Latin rite are first called into question for typically medieval motives that no one with any sense would heed today. So it is not the proponents of restoration but its opponents that are behind the times, stuck in a medieval rut out of which the major Catholic scholarly voices in this field have been leading the Church in this century.

(. . . )

Of course, no one can expect every Eastern Catholic Church leader to know all this history. What one can expect of them, however, is that they trust the leadership of the supreme universal magisterium of the Catholic Church in its indications for this renewal and to do what they are told. The supreme magisterium’s policies for our liturgical renewal may not always meet with understanding and agreement, but they should at least meet with obedience. Otherwise, what can we possibly mean when we say Eastern Catholic? But unless the liturgical restoration is accompanied by an interior renewal of the Eastern Christian ethos and spirit, it will remain little more than ritualism. As the late Archbishop Joseph Tawil wrote in his Christmas message of 1970, we must have “the courage to be ourselves”.

jjp,

You come off to me like a Democrat inquisitor.

You make broad brush charges which are foolish.

Father Loya would be greatly surprised to learn that I am actually Latinized.

He would be very surprised to learn that he is perhaps Latinized.

I think he would bristle at the accusation. If he had the time I'm sure he would respond but he has two radio broadcasts per week one of which is called "Light of the East"

and I must make sure that my students read "Orientale Lumen" each semester.

Would someone start a thread titled "Fight Like Foolish Children Here Instead of Screwing up Productive and Interesting Threads with your Idiotic Squabbling"?

Are you going to be the star?

From Fr. Robert Taft, Liturgy in the Life of the Church, a lecture delivered to the assembled Eastern Catholic bishops of North America and Australia in 1999: