Interesting! I’m genuinely curious, though, if a church has confessionals, celebrates a different (shorter) liturgy, has Rosaries before Mass, etc., how are those “abuses”? Do they violate canons or prescribed norms?
They are abuses because they do not follow the Byzantine traditions, any Latinization is an abuse of the Byzantine tradition.
CCEO Canon 28 gives the distinction:
Ukrainian from mainly Galicia in Ukraine, parts of Poland
I’d like to see you try and stop the Slovak Baba’s from saying the Rosary in the evening in church. They’d ride your dupa out of the village on a rail.
Adding to Ciero’s answer, yes; the prescribed norm for the Mystery of Confession is in front of the ikon of Christ in the iconostasis, though some priests will use the ikon of the Theotokos if somebody is praying near the ikon of Christ. The Ruthenians are the only Eastern church to give Confession to laymen at the prothesis (a side-altar behind the iconostasis) - normatively this is a privilege only given to priests. My church uses the depecratory formula for confession, but something closer to the Latin formula is required by the Ruthenian bishops (our church doesn’t have a pastor, but borrows a Benedictine monk with faculties from the Romanians - so the bishop really doesn’t have a say in the matter). However, the priest is still required to place the stole on the penitent’s head during absolution (and some priests, like our old pastor who used to be Greek Orthodox, will place it on our shoulders during the confession). Confession is to be said facing the ikon, side-by-side with the priest. The one time I asked for Confession from a Ukrainian priest I did not touch a stole and a grill was between us. (I went first to the ikon of Christ in the iconostasis - the Church was empty - and Father asked me to come to the sacristy. I do not even know why the building has confessionals.)
That’s a private devotion; it’s not replacing Orthros before Liturgy. I pray the Rosary - usually in the Latin form - frequently, striving to do so every day. But I don’t do it before Liturgy (except sometimes in the car, after somebody reads me the prayers before Liturgy from a Melkite book - it’s over an hour’s drive to get there, so why not?)
I think you could quote many internet mavens o that would agree with your comments, but are they true? Can you substantiate them. I think that methodology of Tisserant may have left something to be desired. First, while the collection of links that you gave make it clear that there is at least some respect paid to the particularity of tradition, its development over the centuries, how much was in fact paid? Can you tell us about how they made decisions about what was a Latinisms and what was an authentic particular practice?
If you are want to go this route then you must be prepared to discuss you decision-making process by which you discern the more authentically Eastern, version of Eastern". Is this within your competence?
First, the direction of my spiritual father. My first Byzantine spiritual father was an Athonite monk who translated to Catholicism, my spiritual director at the church where I live now was born in Europe, and both have praised the priest at in the church I will be moving to in September. Secondly, my studies from reading. Thirdly, what I have learned from my friends, some of whom translated to Catholicism from Orthodoxy. Finally, what I see in Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches, which are really the standard I hold to everything else. They just feel much more authentic - my gut feels at home there.
Frankly I don’t care for much of anything that you wrote in this post. I don’t understnad where you get you ideas of what is appropriate or not. But this comment on the liturgy is
Hospodi Pomiluj, Hospodi Pomiluj, Hospodi Pomiluj.
Typical for the Greeks (some of my pastors have had choice words to say about their “butchering the Liturgy even worse than we do”), but not usually for the Russians or Serbians.
Same standard I used to come to the East from the West. I saw spiritual beauty with the eye of my heart (my nous), and followed it until I felt at home. Like the emissaries of St. Volodymyr.
Well, we were under the EP until union. We are not Russians. (And from what I gather neither are the Ukrainians.) Russian practice is an alien and inauthentic criterion for discerning our tradition. And so is what some individual finds “beautiful” with their nous.
There were different groups in Rome working at the time on the slavic recensions. They decided to work together to produce the slavic recensions:
