Another ignorant question on my part.
Generally, there are Eastern Rite Catholic churches that are close in practices to the Orthodox churches we are more familiar with. For example, there is an Eastern Catholic church that’s close in form to the Greek Orthodox Church.
Is this true for the Russian Orthodox Church? That is, is there a Catholic church close in form to the Russian Orthodox?
There are
four Russian Eastern/Greek Catholic Church parishes in the US. What you mean by “close in form” I’m not sure. We are all formally under Latin bishops, with some having greater or lesser pastoral care from Melkite bishops (Ex: our deacon was ordained in our church by the Melkite bishop), so I think each parish has determined for itself what calendar it has chosen and therefore which saints are commemorated. I believe we have a poster here on CAF from the Russian Greek Catholic parish in El Segundo. I saw icons of “contemporary” Russian saints in their church and I think I asked him and was told they do commemorate these. I can’t remember now which liturgical calendar they follow (Gregorian, or revised Julian, I do not think they are on the Julian.)
The only other two I have followed at all are the in Trinity-St. Nicholas Russian Catholic Church, in Victoria Australia, and Eglise catholique russe de Paris, both of which you can find on Facebook. I believe they are both on the Julian calendar year round which would tend to make me think they follow a Russian Orthodox praxis, but I don’t know that for sure.
My parish follows the Revised Juilan Calendar and we use a liturgical calendar put out by St Tikhon’s Seminary press. We use the Orthodox Church in America translations and texts for services. Our clergy use prayer books from the OCA. (The OCA isn’t strictly Russian Orthodox although its origins are coming from The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America, Orthodox, not Catholic as in affiliated with Rome, and its autocephalous status was granted by the Russian Orthodox Church.)
We had a visitor from the Russian Greek Catholic parish in Denver and she said they use the same prayers/music we do, so they also apparently were at least then using the OCA prayer books and Typicon. There are OCA parishes who are on the Julian Calendar year round but the OCA website follows the revised Juilan-- i.e. Julian for the Pascalion, Gregorian the rest of the year, which we follow.
There are variations in how the Liturgy is celebrated depending sometimes on the parish itself, both in ECCs and in Orthodox parishes. For example, in the OCA parishes I have been in the priest’s prayers during the Anaphora are audible, whereas in the ROCOR (and Greek Orthodox) I have been in those prayers cannot typically be heard beyond the Holy Place except in the very smallest of chapels, or perhaps when there is only a single cantor and no choir. Our priests basically pray audibly all but their own private prayers, and the parishioners and choir do respond with the “Amens”, etc.
The ROCOR cathedral here in SF used to be strict about women not wearing pants and covering their heads. That is no longer true. In the OCA parishes that varies, but generally there are some women in pants, and few with headcovering, although I know one parish locally where heads are covered and probably no pants. We have some visitors to my parish who cover their heads but the regular women of our parish do not. (Sister Vassa Larin who is a ROCOR nun I would guess in her later 30s, daughter of a ROCOR priest, said when she was a child women did not cover their heads in Russian Orthodox parishes. Interesting.)
We use small individual
prosphora for our prayer intentions as do Russian Orthodox, which for example Greeks do not use.
If there are other things you meant by “close in form to the Russian Orthodox” let me know. As I said we have no Russian Catholic heirarch and so it has been up to the parish and priest to determine praxis it seems. It is our goal at my parish that one would notice little difference in Liturgy itself, other than the commemorations of the Pope of Rome and our bishop, as opposed to an Orthodox Metropolitan and bishop.
