Friday, June 17, 2005


Christianity in the Roman World (30 AD - 313 AD) Posted by Hello

1 comment:

James A. Bretney said...

From an email I recieved:

EASTERN RITE "OPTION"
…this is only an excerpt from the info I saw in this website: very traditional. I don’t know what I’ll find next,


The question comes up whether the Eastern Rites offer an alternative
for traditional Roman Catholics. The answer is no.

First, of all, Catholics are generally prohibited from switching
rites. The is particularly true in the case of (traditional) Roman-Rite
Catholics, who are already members of the Church's precedential rite.
Therefore, in those rare cases where rite switching is permitted, the
transition is almost always from the Eastern to the Roman, the rite of St.
Peter.

Second, the Eastern Rites have in many cases abandoned their
Apostolic form. At one time the Easterns had Apostolic rites, but many have
now fallen away from these because of the constant wars and conquests of
invasion in the East (from which the Western Church has thankfully been
spared). The liturgical scholar Fr. Adrian Fortescue once wrote: "The
ruthless destruction of the ancient rites in favor of uniformity has been the
work not of Rome but of the schismatical patriarchs of Constantinople. Since
the thirteenth Century Constantinople in its attempt to make itself the one
center of the Orthodox Church has driven out the far more venerable and
ancient liturgies of Antioch and Alexandria and has compelled all the
Orthodox to use its own late derived rite."

Finally, since Vatican II many of the Eastern churches substitute a
more vernacularized, Novus-Ordoized worship service. This is particularly
true in the United States. Roman-Rite Catholics are easily duped by these
"modernized" Eastern rites because they are ignorant of the Eastern Rite and
their liturgical languages (Biblical Greek, Syriac, etc.).

It must be noted that the Eastern rites are practiced both by the
Eastern Orthodox, who are formally schismatic from the Roman Catholic Church,
and by the Eastern Unitates, who are part of the Roman Catholic Church. A
particularly virulent form of the Eastern Schism is the so-called "Western
Orthodox" rite, which is a sham to lure Roman Catholics to cross the
fence into the Eastern Schism.