The Twain Meet

By the Very Rev’d Fr. Paul W.S. Schneirla Vicar General of the Western Rite

Originally printed in The Word, a publication of the Antiochian Archdiocese, May 1993.

…East is east and West is west
and never the twain shall meet…

Kipling

Many of us were born into a Christian world where traditional churches were using worship services that had developed into tightly organized rituals over the centuries. Believers frequently identified so intimately with the familiar forms that the slightest, even inadvertent, variation from the norm could provoke comment, even distress or a parish revolution. The climate has changed both because of greater ease of travel and communication and as the result of over a century of scholarly study of liturgy, the discipline that investigates the history and meaning of the inherited customs of worship.

Local Rites Evolve

The earliest Christian worship was evidently extemporaneous but following a well-understood general pattern with the result that the many surviving liturgics are broadly the same in outline and intent. As the Church expanded over the known world, the outward form of the Eucharist and other services took on local characteristics of mood, language, music and ceremony and different rites evolved. Probably the oldest to crystallize was the West Syrian usage which lies behind the Byzantine, and the non-Chalcedonian Syrian, the Coptic and Armenian were originally in use in the Orthodox Church. But the anti-Chalcedonian movement of the fifth century and the subsequent Arab Islamic domination of the ancient Patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria, while the Crusaders so reduced the number of local Orthodox in Jerusalem that a Greek Patriarch of Antioch, Theodore Balsamon (†1214) decreed that All the Churches of God must follow the custom of New Rome (i.e. Constantinople) and celebrate the liturgy according to the tradition of those great Church Fathers and beacons of piety, SS John Chrysostom And Basil. So we Antiochians lost our Syriac liturgy which still exists among the non-Chalcedonians and Maronites but was replaced for us by the Greek rite. This later followed the spread of the Orthodox Church to the north and across Asia so that until today in many local variations, it continues as the almost universal rite of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Except for a tiny foothold in southern Italy, the Greek rite never replaced the local Western rites and when the Papacy fell away from the Orthodox Church in the eleventh century, the Western rites were lost to the Church for somewhat different reasons but just as the Syrian, Armenian, Coptic and Nestorian (West Syrian) rites continued only outside of the Church.

The Western Rite

Because the Western Roman Empire lacked the centralization of Byzantium, a great many local rites developed in Orthodox Western Europe. In the sixteenth century there were five separate diocesan uses in England alone: Salisbury, Hereford, Bangor, York and Lincoln, and whole families of rites evolved around great cities, e.g. Milan, Braga, Lyons and a Mozarabic rite in Spain under the Arab conquerors, as well as others for some religious orders. When the Papacy convoked the Council of Trent to resist the Protestant Reformation, any rite with a long history was allowed to survive, some did so until the Second Vatican Council and some still survive, for example, the particular rite of the Archdiocese of Milan (the Mozarabic rite continues in one church in Spain as a sort of Antique).

If you have followed this far you know that rites are local reflections of the faith and that no one of them is the one and only. Only with the invention of printing did rites attain uniformity.

Why an Orthodox Western Rite?

The Papacy, monolithic and highly centralized, never lost the understanding that unity in faith and communion did not require absolute uniformity in worship and discipline. Hence the Uniate eastern churches: Armenian, Ukrainian and our cousins the Melkites, &c. Substantially eastern in the worship, customs and discipline, they differ from the Orthodox only in their allegiance to the Pope and Roman doctrine. Any Church that claims to be the one, holy universal Church of the Creed—as both Rome and Orthodoxy do—cannot be confined to a limited local vision of Christianity. The problem with Uniates, utterly anathema to many Orthodox, is not that they exist but the fact that they were often used as a false front to proselytize Orthodox faithful by unworthy means, either by civil persecution or by appealing to the faithful in such a way as to produce rice Christians.

It was inevitable that sooner or later some western converts would approach the Orthodox Church and ask to be permitted to retain the rites used in the west before the break between Rome and Constantinople. The likelihood was all the greater because in the past it sometimes appeared that to become Orthodox one must also become a Levantine or a Slav and not every Occidental is able to shed the culture tic or she was born in and adopt an exotic one.

The first major approach was made in the late nineteenth century by a Roman Catholic priest, John Joseph Overbeck, who revised the Roman rite to conform to Orthodox standards, a fairly simple operation at that time. His proposal was accepted by the Russian Orthodox Holy Synod and he was encouraged and supported by interested missionary-minded Russians, but by the time of his death in the first decade of Twentieth Century, his movement had not succeeded and his converts were absorbed into Byzantine communities.

At the turn of the ccntury, the only Orthodox bishop in North America, the later Russian Patriarch Tikhon (Belavin) was approached by a group of Episcopalians, who asked to be allowed to continue the use of the American Book of Common Prayer rather than the Byzantine rite. Bishop Tikhon petitioned the Holy Synod of Moscow and a commission of theologians was directed to provide a detailed examination and revision of the Prayer Book to be approved for the converts (the report was printed in the Journal of the Theological Academy of St. Petersburg, a summary in English was printed in The Russian American Messenger, a critical review by two Anglican scholars appeared as Tract XII of the Alcuin Club and a fuller version with notes appeared in The Orthodox Catholic Review, a publication of the Antiochian Archdiocese).

Metropolitan Gerassimos (Messerah) of Beirut received a Western Rite movement in England before World War I, and Metropolitan Germanos (Shehadi), while resident in the United States, engaged in negotiations to receive a Roman Catholic movement in Mexico in the 1920s. Neither of these projects resulted in a continuing community. They are noticed here to demonstrate that an Orthodox Western Rite is not a recent project.

Our present Western Rite Vicariate began with the return of a few parishes of converts that had dropped out of our diocese in the difficult days after World War I. It was approved by the late Patriarch Alexander in and was finally received in the early 1950s. There are presently some twenty centers. There are no invented services: the parishes use either the form approved for Overbeck or for Patriarch Tikhon, now a saint of the Church.

The laity are persons of traditional Orthodox Faith, disillusioned by the progressive liberal stance of some mainline traditional churches; that is, communities that have a fixed, historic form of Worship. We do not mount a proselytizing program, but provide an option for those who have already rejected changes in their former denomination. Our stance is utterly different from the campaign that tore the Uniates out of Orthodoxy.

With the current tendency of traditional Christian churches to bless homosexual marriages, trash familiar worship patterns, ordain women, tolerate the neglect of family values, deny Biblical revelation and otherwise follow secular leadership, our Western tern Rite has become the most successful missionary of the Archdiocese. Its outreach is far different from that of the Evangelical Movement which is directed at a very special audience.

In the last century there were cradle Orthodox who viewed the Western Rite, not as the restoration of a long-lost part of the Church, but as a dangerous intrusion. For them Overbeck wrote in 1866:

My dear Eastern friends, I conjure you not to undervalue the difference of the Eastern and Western minds, and their different forms of thinking and worshipping…it is a requisite of paramount importance, not to lose the Western ground, not to attempt to assimilate, extrinsically the Eastern and Western Orthodox Church. Both, through having the same faith and fundamental constitution of the Catholic Church, must keep their formal peculiarities, which have become a part of their inmost life, and which cannot be changed like a dress. Divine Providence formed the Western Church on the Western Mind; therefore our Western form is inalienable from our Western minds. Our difference from the East is only formal; but I venture to maintain that often formal obstacles were a more serious bar to unity than even material ones.

But the apostolate of the Western Rite is not alone a means to make Orthodox truth available to those who lost it, or never had it, and now want it. A major thrust is to witness to the claim of Orthodoxy to be the unique representative of the early universal Church, not a collection of local ethnic religions. It lifts our eyes beyond our limited horizons to our mandate to bring all people to the Church.