Yes.
Especially when one thinks about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who innocently violated this principle.
I had a friend at my old Byz Catholic parish that spent his entire adulthood in the Ruthenian church and was completely unaware that he was not Byzantine.
He was married there, and his children were baptized there. He was very involved, a model parishioner! Only a few years ago he learned that he was not ‘canonical’, and boy was he hurt! I suppose that means his kids were not canonical too!
He never knew that he was supposed to have honored the Latin calendar all his life.
Now before you tell me that his ignorance mitigates his culpability, I will tell you right now that the whole concept is unnecessary. Canonical enrollment is nothing more than a form of church bookkeeping. As soon as it becomes a cause of sin, it is a practice that has lost it’s purpose.
I am reminded of something we have all read:
“The law entered in so that transgression might increase”
But unlike God’s Law forbidding the fruit of that certain tree, this is a law made by bureaucrats in brocade. The divisions between rite are artificial in an institutional way.
This would not have happened in the early church, one would travel to a new area and deal with the change in liturgy and the change in calendar. No sin incurred, that’s just how it is.
As one who has lived as a Roman Catholic in a Byzantine parish, I can say with certainty that it is so difficult as to be detrimental to ones spiritual growth, one must actually cultivate an obsession to comply, and Byzantine parishes don’t distribute Latin calendars as a convenience!
Nor do Latin parishes distribute Byzantine calendars. Not only that, it is fairly certain that most (actual) Ruthenians in the United States are worshipping in latin parishes (if they still worship at all) some for generations (again an artificial construct) and might not even realize that the are not Latins themselves. This means that they (or their parents/grandparents/predecessors) started to live as latins without regard to their own church’s canonical requirements. Most going to their graves unaware that some kind of “sin” has occured!
The church exists as a means of salvation, not as an excuse for condemnation. This is especially egregious in light of eastern spirituality, splitting hairs over Holy Days is a foreign concept, what room for economy?
It is all well and good to boast of being able to partake of sacraments in any Catholic church of any rite. But the dark side is that if one begins to live that life in another church, they are likely to be ‘technically’ considered sinners.
It’s just plain ridiculous.
