Originally posted by Dmitri Rostovski:
I tend to agree with agape. I see many parallels between the NO Mass and the Divine Liturgy.
Christ, no!
It's enough that the NO departs from the deposit of liturgical tradition by severing all ties with a 2000 year old patrimony (which should be the cardinal point here, not the matter of aesthetics or even the objective worth and quality of the prayers by comparison). Continuity is an essential concept for us Easterners, meaning gradual development as opposed to re-creation.
Things taken out of context are worthless and have no use in any place except in the scrapheap. Easterners should be incensed that what goes on in the Roman Church be done in their name. Standing and the taboo against kneeling on Sundays is a part of our tradition. It isn't worth a copper penny in the Latin tradition. Standing is promoted on our side of the fence to exhibit profound reverence to God and attention to the happenings at the Liturgy, and to show proper conduct for the joyful day of the Resurrection. In the West it's used to undermine every iota of respect owed to God in the Mass. Married clergy: does anyone think the motives for such a thing in the Latin Church are commendable or have anything to do with the basis of our venerable tradition of the married priesthood? The reasons for this drive may even be an insult to the dignity of the married priesthood (I don't think CTA or CFFC have the right motives in mind when calling for the doing away of priestly celibacy). The Latin Mass and the Eastern Liturgies had been formed through time and careful fine tuning all from the wisdom of our ancestors. A comittee created manufacturing product does not even begin to measure up to an Eastern Liturgy. And both species: I don't think passing the "cup" from one bufoon to the next has anything to do with us. A proper application of our tradition would probably be to accurately translate the Tridentine Mass into proper English or to do as the Armenians do in communing under both kinds: intinction. That's legitimate reform. A liturgical upheaval is not, and has and should have nothing whatsoever to do with us Easterners. As for the epiklesis, I support what Serge said once on this. The Roman Mass and the very ancient and untouchable Canon is not to be jettisoned for some stupid, inane ploy to Easternize it. Altering it because it has no 'proper' epiklesis is insulting and rediculous, especially if it means whipping up a new rite of Mass altogether. Bringing what seemingly looks Eastern (I'm no fan of Ikons in Latin churches) into the West, tout suit, up to and including the very Canon of the Mass, is, and I never seem to be able to exhaust the use of this Greek allusion, handing the reins to a bunch of Phaetons who can only cause disaster. These folks don't know what they're doing and have no idea what being Eastern means. They'll only demolish their own Church by incorporating Eastern and not so Eastern stuff like bear hugs at Mass, and the understanding of the Liturgy as a banquet in order to counter their traditional theology, developed over the course of centuries, that is heavily built on the notion of Sacrifice, and helping to nullify any belief in the Real Presence, certainly not its (the idea of banquet) function in our Eastern theology that doesn't need, in order to prevent the faithful from doubting the Real Presence, to emphasize strongly on the static presence of Christ in the Eucharist outside of the liturgical context.
I was always taught that many Eastern Catholics participated in the changes made by Vatican II. I beleive there was even input from the Orthodox Observers.
His Beautitude Maximos IV's aim was to counter the Westernizing tendencies and pressure that had been directed at the Eastern Catholic Churches for a long time. And this is evidenced by his refusing to address the Council Fathers in Latin, but French. He encouraged collegiality and the vernacular. Easternization was his motive (the Orthodox praised him in speaking on their behalf). I personally do not agree with the Patriarch's recommendations to the Roman Church itself (Latinization/Easternization--they're all two sides of the same coin, and undersirable), but am emphatically proud of his standing up for OUR Churches. The Latin Church's affairs are none of our business. But our rights and priveleges as Easterners must be respected, and in that context, the Patriarch's words were thundering.
But to hint that the Council, much less the Patriarch himself (please, no one connect him to that folly of papal decision-making that took the Latins on a roller coaster ride to insanity) would have even contemplated the NO liturgical revolution is quite shivering. A Melkite priest I know well couldn't believe how "the Latins had dumped their own patrimony." And our father, the Patriarch said the following at the Council:
"We must not allow the adaptation of the liturgy to become an obsession. The liturgy, like the inspired writings, has a permanent value apart from the circumstances giving rise to it. Before altering a rite we should make sure that a change is strictly necessary. The liturgy has an impersonal character and also has universality in space and time. It is, as it were, timeless and thus enables us to see the divine aspect of eternity. These thoughts will enable us to understand what at first seem shocking in some of the prayers of the Liturgy - feasts that seem no longer appropriate, antiquated gestures, calls to vengeance which reflect a pre-Christian mentality, anguished cries in the darkness of the night, and so on. It is good to feel oneself thus linked with all the ages of mankind. We pray not only with our contemporaries but with men who have lived in all centuries."
As to Slavonic, I personnaly love it. I think it is important to have a liturgical language. However, I would like to point out that neither Slavonic nor Church Greek are vernacular languagues per see.
Yes. A liturgical language is not opposed to the vernacular, let's make that clear! A liturgical language is formed when a new nation (and I don't speak in the modern context, such as that multicultural cocktail called North America) is evangelized, a new people with their own language and history and ethnic ties. A new Church is established by the mother Church, or the mother Church gains new territory and jurisdiction. Excepting a few cases in the Old Country, where Slavonic I believe, was replaced by a vernacular Eastern European language, the new language of the Church is either an old form of the vernacular (such as the Fushah Arabic or Ge'ez in Ethiopia) or the vernacular form that becomes archaic in the future. (such as is the case in Greece; A Greek Canadian tells me, watching a TV broadcast of Divine Liturgy, "You think I understand what the heck they're saying?") Amazing! Eastern Churches then must have been violating the rule and tradition of the vernacular even before America and its inculturation of immigrants existed!!! That's silly of course. The tradition of the vernacular as I understand it means the evangelization of new nations in a language other than that of the mother Church. Latin isn't unique in that it is a language "nobody understands". It takes effort for the uneducated ethnic to understand Fushah Arabic or Koine Greek, and there are difficulties to it. The understanding of a "lingua sacra" or language or special form of language preserved for the divine celebrations is not some Latin concoction. What differentiates the Latins from us is that they evangelized nations in Latin only, and there was only to be one Patriarch of the West. No new Churches were to be formed or established under another Western Patriarchate according to the Western model of evangelization. The tradition of the Church of Rome, which included the new nations it evangelized with time, was to be rooted in its Latin heritage and language. The East on the other hand did well in its mode of evangelization that opened the opportunity for autocephalous Churches with their own lingua sacra, which was their own vernacular, and by vernacular I don't mean the colloqial, but what is part of the cultural patrimony of the people, such as Fushah Arabic and Grapar Armenian and Coptic. These languages or forms of language may not be considered vernacular according to some here since they are not spoken, or even understood by some, but they are languages that belong to the culture itself and are of the people and part of their heritage (unlike what Latin is to a Celt or a Scandinavian) But as for the Latin only charge, has anyone considered (and I'm no linguist, so I don't know if this is true) the possibility that the relation between Slavonic and today's Eastern European languages is the same as that between Latin and the Romance languages. Aren't the latter merely Latin dialects? If Slavonic and old Greek is considered a correct example of the Eastern Church's evangelizing in the vernacular in the case of Eastern Europe and Greece, can not the same be said for Latin in the case of what were once Latin dialects? Is not Latin the "vernacular" to those countries as Slavonic is to Eastern Europe?
Although Byzantines in this country use English, in the old country it is the Church languages that are used. I know many Greeks and Russians who can't follow the Litrugy without help. Just my thoughts..
So two choices present themselves. Either the vernacular must always mean a language the populace at large understands and speaks in (and if they are raised to understand the old "church" tongues, they will, believe you me), in which case the Eastern Church as a whole has flouted the Eastern guidelines and violated the Eastern ethos for centuries with Slavonic and old Greek and old Armenian and Syriac, or it means a language that belongs to the culture and land in question, which allows for the "Latin" notion of a lingua sacra, an archaic old, sometimes unintelligible form of the mother tongue. I am partial to the latter. I wouldn't have Liturgy celebrated in an old Damascene dialect if I had a knife to my throat.
As for English, the reason that invoking the magic word "vernacular" in the case of America is ineffective, I believe, is because of the misplaced context in which it is used in addition to the fact that it is a gross anachronism to make parallels between conducting the Liturgy in English on this continent and Sts. Cyril and Methodious evangelizing the Slavic nations in Slavonic.
To face America, one must realize and confess that it is essentially a cultural and historical abberation by its own nature, and an absolutely artificial society, by the standards of any normal development of "nations and peoples", as understood by historians and sociologists (had they existed back then) throughout time (I'm sure Ibin Khaldoun would have passed out at the thought), or as understood by the Church in its mission of evangelizing and "preaching to all the peoples and all the nations". America is certainly not a civilization, but a pocketful of ethnicities that are melted down into a lowest common denominator--a bunch of mutilated subcultures, and hence an anti-culture. [Hope you Irish are enjoying St. Paddy's :-)]
As much as one would like to ethnically compromise a Church abroad and turn it into an ethnic melting pot, that Church is not an American autocephalous Church. It remains a Church whose very identity rests on its point of origin, and whose existance on this soil is initially owed to the task of providing for immigrants in the diaspora. This abnormal situation lends itself to all sorts of problems such as the overlapping jurisdictions, some of which strangely enough, probably are no longer consitituted by the ethnics or nationals that identified the uniqueness of those Churches and jurisdictions to begin with. Needless to say, these Churches, much aided by the Roman Church's going kaput, went far beyond mission parameters when the floodgates from disoriented Latins, amongst others, broke open (Antiochian Orthodox in charge of a Western Orthodox vicariate; I can still hardly believe it. His Beautitude Ignatius wouldn't conceive of such an idea). America is a disfigurement of the normal development cycles of nations and peoples. As a result, these abnormalities will spill over to our Churches and its peoples. Over here identity, nationality, origin, history all take a whole new spin and meaning apart from what us Old World folk understand them to be (hence people seeming to believe a Church is Slavonic because of its traditions, not because it is actually based across the Atlantic and NOT an American Church, and not because of its ethnicity, the PEOPLE, as Dr. John says, that make it up, the ones who are the bearers of that tradition to begin with). Therefore to suggest that the Eastern Church abroad that exists first and foremost to serve its flock in the diaspora without prejudice to the occasional convert, and that insists on using the liturgical language, the proper vernacular if I may (whether the descendants pick up on it or not), exclusively or to some or an overwhelming degree, is so clearly violating the Eastern custom of evangelizing or conducting Liturgy in the vernacular, and to suggest that this is clear cut, inisinuating that there is a clear parallel between Sts. Cyril and Methodious evangelizing the Slavs in Slavonic, and having the Antiochian Orthodox faithful discard Arabic to the scrapheap because their 3rd generation American children katapulted their language and heritage to the realm of obscurity, is breathtakingly nonsensical.
(No wonder there is a push for autonomy; the Antiochian Orthodox Church and the Antiochian Orthodox Church abroad seem to have nothing in common.)
There can only be one acceptable resolution to allow such changes, an American autocephalous Church. But I am of the opinion that Rite is rooted to culture, hence ethnicity and a people and nation, hence geography. As I said on another thread, I am not happy with Latin or Hellenic Christianity in Africa. The Rite is not compatible with the culture. Thus the Alexandrian tradition has a designated geographic scope, Africa. So with the Byzantine Church: an autocephalous Eastern Byzantine Church in America, in the West, composed of Western ethnicities? It seems illogical to me, cementing a Rite of a certain cultural mindset with peoples retrospectively of Western European descent that is not compatible with the Rite, and establishing this as an independant Church. Excepting the Alaskan missionary work amongst the Inuits, I've always seen the land of American natives and Western immigrants as traditional Jesuit territory. Of course given the Roman Church's state and the wreck of the Jesuit order, a lot of those gains have been lost and I don't see the Jesuits of old reclaiming it back.
And as for India, with all due respect to St. Francis Xavier, we should make it all Thomist. Funny, those Jesuits. I take much pride in their evangelizing in the lands West of Europe in the Americas, but am shocked and infuriated by what they did when they came into contact with Eastern Churches. The Spanish Americas may be valid lands of Trent and counter-Reformation, but please leave the Easterns out of it. I have quite a hate-love-hate relationship with the Jesuits. That's two hates because of their doings amongst Easterners and because they self-destructed and sold out in the 20th century.
Some of my candid opinions. Excuse the sharp tone.
In IC XC
Samer
Shame on you for implying otherwise! 
:rolleyes: