Adrian Henry Timothy Knottesford Fortescue

“ That is always the attitude of the Holy See. The Popes understand very well that rite is not of the essence of religion. They tolerate no variety in the Faith, since there can be only one true revelation from God. But in the matter of rite they know that different customs suit different people; they know that God will judge men according to the lives they lead, not according to the rites they use.
So, not only does the Catholic Church allow diversities of rites; as a matter of fact, she is the only religious body that does so. ”

“ In any society the test of unity is the mutual acknowledgement of all the members. Where there are separate groups, which do not recognize one another, we have not one, but several societies. In this way we speak of separate Churches, such as the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Nestorian Church, and so on. These are really separate Churches, because there is no mutual recognition between their members; they are not in communion with one another. When we distinguish between the Roman (or Latin) Church and the Uniate Churches, we make a distinction of quite another kind. ”

“ Really he is obeying the Canon Law of his Patriarchate, to which he has just as much right as we have to our laws.
Does anyone think St Athanasius, St Basil, St John Chrysostom imperfect Catholics? The modern Uniate stands exactly where they stood. Like them he is in communion with the chief of all Patriarchs at Rome; like them he acknowledges the primacy of the Pope and obeys him as Primate. But like them he is not bound by local Western Patriarchal laws; like them he thinks his laws and rite and customs just as good as ours. ”

“ It would hardly be possible to find an accusation that would offend them more, or be more unjust, than to say that they are not purest of the pure Byzantines, in their rites, habits, rule, and everything. At the same time Leo XIII founded, in the monastery, a college for Italo-Greeks, youths who are to become priests of their rite. These boys serve the church and sing the offices with the monks most beautifully. Any traveller who goes out from Rome on a Sunday morning may assist here at the Byzantine Liturgy, celebrated perfectly and sung exquisitely. ”

“ It is the oldest Greek centre now existing in Italy; it has a glorious history covering ten centuries; it has always been, it still is, the chief centre of their rite, to which all Italo-Greeks look. To the man who thinks that Popes want to turn everyone into a Latin the best answer is this venerable sanctuary, where under the very walls of Rome, protected, blessed, and favoured by a long series of Popes, Greek monks for over 900 years have never ceased to worship God according to an Eastern rite. ”

“ Yet so little do many Catholics in the West realize this position, so little conscious have they been of their fellow-Catholics in the East, that one still finds people who make the fatal mistake of confusing our one Patriarchate with the whole Church. When one hears Catholics say that no Catholic priest may be married, that all Catholics have exactly the same Mass all over the world, one sees to what blunders this confusion between our Western Patriarchate and the whole Church of Christ may lead. ”

“ The very fact that they keep and cherish their union with Rome, although the schismatics are never tired of calling them slaves, of boasting of their own liberty, shows how real this ideal must be to the Uniates. It requires some strength of conviction to acknowledge as your chief a bishop of a foreign rite, to submit the rules of your own liturgy to the supervision of men who themselves use another. They draw this strength from their unswerving belief in the Catholic ideal of one universal, united Church of God. ”

“ In contemplating the absurd quarrels there have been among Eastern schismatics on the question of rite, in seeing the preposterous way they always seem to think the form of prayers used in a service, even the language in which these prayers are said, to be a vital matter of the Christian faith, in noticing the arrogant tyranny with which Eastern Patriarchs put down any other rite than their own in their spheres of authority, their ridiculous jealousy of foreign rites, in seeing all this, we are always impressed by the different attitude of the Holy See. ”

“ Indeed, from my experience I am inclined to think that the pride of the Uniates in their communion with Rome is sometimes even excessive, that they look with too much scorn on their non-uniate neighbours. Any Latin in the Levant will see with what pride the Uniates he meets remember that they belong to the same body as he does, that they have a right to the same consciousness of citizenship in the great Church as he. They are conscious, too, that they are better educated, more strict in their laws, more edifying in the lives of their clergy than the other Eastern Christians. ”

“ It is much stranger to find sometimes even Catholics who do real injustice to their fellow-Catholics of Eastern rites. One can understand that Protestants are unjust to them. The existence and particularly the superiority of the Uniate Churches is a fact most damaging to their theories of the Papacy as only recognized in the West, to that identification of "Roman Catholic" with "Latin," which is the great point of their branch theory. But of all people we Western Catholics should glory in the Uniate Churches. They are an exceedingly important factor in our concept of the universal Church ”

“ That attitude is always one of entire approval of and respect for those other rites, which have just as legitimate a place in the Catholic Church as the Roman rite. No Pope has ever wanted to force the Roman rite on all Catholics. In faith and morals we all have one standard; in rites, different races have their own customs. ”

“ It is the right sort of loyalty, to an ideal, not to persons. They have no more personal devotion towards Italian Cardinals and the Monsignori of the Roman congregations than we have in the North. What they care for is the one united Church of Christ throughout the world, and the Holy See as guarding that unity. They see around them the same process of erosion among the schismatics as we see among the Protestants; and they, too, understand that the bond of union among Catholics is our common loyalty to the primate-see. ”

“ There is no special reason why we should not. The distinction between Latins and Uniates comes, first from a certain precedence that the Roman Patriarchate must have, still more perhaps from an accident of history. Certainly, since the Roman Patriarch is the chief of his brethren, it would be strange to begin by considering any other branch of the Church as the standard, and then putting him with all that remain in one group, as being in union with a lesser dignitary than himself. If the Pope is in union with another bishop, it is more natural to call the other bishop the Uniate than the Pope. ”

“ It is only from ignorance, because in the West we so rarely see a Catholic of an Eastern rite, that our people when they go to the East sometimes make that most injurious mistake of treating the Uniates as if they were in some way rather less perfect Catholics than we are.
Western people get so used to look upon our Roman rite as the only correct one that they are inclined to think a man who does not use it a kind of half-Catholic, better than the schismatics, but not quite so good as we are. ”

“ Our predecessors not only never had the intention to bring Eastern people to the Latin rite, but, every time they thought it expedient, they have declared in clear and precise terms that the Holy See does not ask Eastern Christians to abandon their own rites, venerable by their antiquity and by the witness of the holy fathers. The Holy See demands one thing only, that in these rites nothing be introduced which would be contrary to the Catholic faith, dangerous for souls, or opposed to virtue ”

“ Except perhaps Lungro, all the Albanian villages of Calabria give the impression of great poverty. All Calabria is a poor land; want of water, natural barrenness of the soil, and the economic difficulties of South Italy combine to make it so. But even in a poor district these Albanian villages stand out as poorer than any. They are also extremely dirty. Their poverty is reflected in their churches. Except at Lungro, the Byzantine churches seem almost abjectly poor and dirty; some are almost in ruins. ”

“ At first the quarrel of Cerularius was no affair of the Egyptians. Then, certainly, the Orthodox of Egypt slipped into schism, through the fact that they maintained communion with Constantinople. But here, too, it seems to have been a gradual and almost unconscious process. Then in Egypt, as in Syria, there are an astonishing number of cases of Patriarchs in union with Rome since the eleventh century. In Egypt, too, Catholics seem to take the line that the whole Patriarchate is not contaminated finally; so that each individual Patriarch, or even his subjects, were judged on their own merits. ”

“ First the Orthodox insisted that, as the Melkites were practically Europeans, they should be made to dress like French priests, wearing the French hat. The malice of this is obvious. It would have stamped them as foreigners at the first glance, would have confused them with the Latin clergy, and would have lost to them the sympathy of natives. It is a common trick to injure a rival religion by representing it as foreign, and so hostile to all patriotic citizens. ”

“ It is true that Uniate morals, as well as Uniate scholarship, are not always quite up to the Western standard. In remote parts of the Church abuses do go on for some time before they are found out and suppressed. But the point is that such abuses are always liable to be found out, and that then they certainly will be suppressed by the authorities at Rome. Among the schismatics there is no further authority beyond that of the Eastern people themselves, the very people whom long bondage under the Turk has made less scrupulous. There is no one to find out and no one to put down the abuses. ”

“ There is no question that the Uniate clergy have had an immeasurably better education than the others. In this matter they have every advantage from their union with the more highly developed West. Even in the detail of language the Uniates have the advantage. Most of them know at least some Latin, many can talk quite good French. This opens to them vast fields of knowledge, closed to the schismatics who know nothing but Arabic. It would be an exaggeration to say that the average Uniate priest is quite up to the level of the average Latin priest. ”

“ For instance, in spite of the dislike which the Roman authorities have for any vagueness or change of rite, a Uniate who has adopted the Latin rite because of the impossibility of finding clergy of his own where he lives, must return to it as soon as the cause of his latinization is removed. A woman who has followed the Latin rite after marrying a Latin husband, may return to her own use after the husband's death. Any Eastern Catholic who has turned Latin, even by virtue of a Papal rescript, is now free to go back to his original rite. ”

“ Since so much civil law, and the state of each subject in temporal matters, depend on the religious body to which he belongs, it is not so surprising that, at last, the Christians themselves have begun to look upon themselves as different nations, in the ordinary sense. This is encouraged by the fact that it has always been extremely difficult for a man in the Turkish Empire to change his religion. We are so used to seeing people change from one religion to another that it would be impossible for us to confuse religion with race. ”

“ The Byzantine Christians have never ceased impudently to quarrel with our customs, have never ceased calling us offensive names because of mere trifles of rite in which we differ from them; on our side there has always been the most complete, the most generous recognition that custom and rite are not in themselves essential things; that it is quite natural that East and West should each have their own practices ”

“ Protestants of all sects constantly make the most absurd statements about them, even otherwise educated Protestants.
The grossest form of error is not even to know that there are any Uniate Churches in the East. One sometimes still hears even this. One reads books in which the writer shows that he really thinks that the only people in union with Rome, the only people who obey the Pope, are those who use the Roman rite in the West. ”