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Building Bridges Between The East And West |
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Written by By John Rossomando, The Bulletin
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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 |
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Saudi Arabia is spending a lot of money to go into Eritrea and Ethiopia to convert Christians to Islam, and every four miles, there is a mosque in an area where there aren’t a lot of Muslims.”
John Rossomando, The Bulletin
Philadelphia — When most people think of the Catholic Church, they think of its Roman, or Western, branch, largely unaware of the world’s approximately 20 million Eastern Catholics. These Catholics have their own traditions similar to those found in the Orthodox churches, their own canon law, different forms of the Mass and many have married priests — all dating from antiquity.
Most Eastern Catholic Churches came into existence following the 16th century Council of Trent after the Catholic Church renounced 13th and 15th century efforts at corporate reunion with the Orthodox, instead sending Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries to convert them while allowing them to retain their ancient traditions.
Who these Catholics and their non-Catholic cousins are was at the heart of a talk held Friday, sponsored by the International Institute for Catholic Culture in Overbrook titled “The Catholic Church: East and West, Past and Present ‘The Origin Of The Ecclesiastical Species.’”
In the local region, Eastern Catholic Churches including the Ukrainians, Armenians, Syro-Malabars from India, Syro-Malankaras from India, Ruthenians, Romanians and Maronites, are represented with parishes and missions of their own. Pennsylvania, due to 20th- century immigration patterns, is home to Christians from virtually every Eastern Christian church, both Catholic and Orthodox.
Many of these churches hail from the Middle East and Africa, where they are endangered by Islamic expansion and persecution, which has caused many to flee.
Chorbishop John D. Faris, an auxiliary bishop in the Maronite Eparchy (diocese) of St. Maron of Brooklyn and deputy secretary general of the New York-based Catholic Near East Welfare Association, told those gathered for the talk about some of the perils faced by some of these Catholics.
He said Ethiopia and Eritrea, both homes to ancient Christian communities dating to the early fourth century A.D., currently face threats from Saudi efforts to convert them.
“Both have a 50-percent Christian population with a Christianity that is so old that it retains Jewish customs such as keeping kosher and practicing circumcision,” Chorbishop Faris said. “They happen to be from a part of the world where Saudi Arabia is spending a lot of money to go into Eritrea and Ethiopia to convert Christians to Islam, and every four miles, there is a mosque in an area where there aren’t a lot of Muslims.”
The Coptic Christians in Egypt who make up 10 percent of the population, 200,000 of whom are Catholic, face serious persecution from the Muslim majority and live in social conditions similar to those faced by blacks under Jim Crow.
Chorbishop Faris said Islamic persecution has also driven much of Iraq’s ancient Chaldean Catholic and Assyrian Christian population into exile in neighboring Jordan, Syria and throughout the West. Persecution has also forced much of the Holy Land’s Eastern Catholic and Orthodox populations to leave.
The plight of these Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic, was only part of the discussion, which looked to explain some of the reasons behind why they are different, yet similar with the majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
“The institute works for Catholic cultural revival,” said Dr. John Haas, the institute’s president. “John Paul II never tired telling us about the cultural riches of the Church and urged modern Catholics to breathe with both lungs of the Church ─ East and West.
“This is no time for division. As Christians, we must lock arms against a hostile culture.”
This talk fell within the institute’s effort to promote cultural revival and Church unity.
Throughout much of the talk, Chorbishop Faris sought to explain the reasons for the diversity of Catholic traditions. He began his lecture trying to draw an analogy between Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, which attempted to explain why the flora and fauna on each island he visited on the HMS Beagle were different, yet similar.
“The similarities and diversity gave rise to questions,” Chorbishop Faris said. “How and why did the diversity take place?”
All Christians of the various ecclesiastical traditions in the Catholic Church trace themselves back to Jesus and the 12 apostles in the first century A.D., a time when Christians did not yet consider themselves as being separate from Judaism. At that time, he said, Judaism consisted of sects such as the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Nazoreans (Jews who believed Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Jewish messiah.).
“How did today’s variety of churches arise?” he asked, repeating the Darwinian analogy he had discussed earlier. He also asked the audience about the conditions that arose to create the wide diversity.
As Christianity grew, it established three main centers in the early centuries: Antioch (now in Turkey), Alexandria in Egypt, and Rome. In each area, the local culture influenced how the Church developed and how the faith was expressed, creating the diversity.
Chorbishop Faris said Christianity began in the cities of the Roman Empire, which set the stage for many of the splits that followed Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in 313. The Church’s legalization presented both a blessing and a curse. This blessing involved being the ability to worship openly and build churches, while the curse involved the tying of the Church with the state. Consequently, rebellion and conflict with the Roman Empire among certain cultural groups led to later schisms.
The presence of Christians outside the empire — such as in the Persian Empire, an enemy of Rome — led to the first major lasting split from the Catholic Church by the Assyrians, sometimes also referred to as the Nestorians, in 431.
He pointed to city/rural dichotomy in areas surrounding Alexandria and Antioch where the city populace was largely Greek, while the rural populations were largely Coptic and Syriac respectively, as a major reason behind the next major split exactly 20 years later. The decrees of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 were identified with the hated Roman state, from whose authority both rural groups were eager to escape, which resulted in a schism that created the Oriental Orthodox family of churches. The Armenians, the world’s oldest Christian nation, followed suit, although it fell outside the Roman Empire.
With the exception of small groups that now form the Chaldean, Coptic and Syriac Catholic Churches, most people belonging to these aforementioned groups remain in schism.
This pattern continued in 1054, when the Greek-speaking portions of the old Eastern Roman Empire split with the Latin West over matters of language, culture and ecclesiastical discipline.
Chorbishop Faris sees the Eastern Catholic churches as a bridge between East and West that he hopes can contribute to the reconciliation between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
“[These churches] contribute to the tapestry of the Church and to unity amid diversity and to a sense of transcendence,” he said.
John Rossomando can be reached at
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