It is odd that you would mention this, but I encountered it myself the one time I attended the Divine Liturgy. I guess Latin Rite Catholics don’t often consider that Eastern Catholics might be struggling with liberalism, too, even if it comes to them from the outside (i.e., disgruntled Latin Catholics.) Actually, the liberal element I came into contact with was in the form of an ex-Roman with “liturgical sensibilities.”
I came into contact with this a decade ago when some of our cradle Greek Catholics and converts (Yes Virginia, there really are people that become Catholic through the Eastern CCs!) suggested the possibility of forming a study group of the (then newly published) Catechism of the Catholic Church. Some of the liberal ex-RCs bitterly complained “That is Latin, that is for them, not us.”
Sadly, not all of the dissent or liberalism has been imported. Some of it is rather home grown. I give you the modern Sisters of St. Basil. (Average age, 75, number of postulents in the last 14 years: 1)
I remember once eating lunch with a member - a grey haired gal in a ***pants suit ***who had just returned from a ***sabbatical ***in New Orleans with some like minded elderly Latin sisters studying some ***neo-spirituality ***and (I kid you not) attending a seminar on renewing the church from patriarchy to “inclusion”.
I gingerly inquired of her what the traditional charism of the Sisters of St. Basil was.
Without skipping a beat “That is a
Latin concept!”
“Oh,
that’s Latin!” Thinks me “You mean like taking sabbaticals, living outside of your monastery, wearing pants suits and NOT habits, eating meat for lunch on a wednesday and railing against patriarchy? How
vostochnik (eastern) of you!”
Of course I kept this to myself out of charity, respect and fear. Honestly, she would have broken me in half.
There has been a bit of a sea change in the past two decades especially in the liturgical and spiritual sensibilities of many Greek Catholics. For decades many were of the mindset that to be “too Eastern” might mean we are not Catholic so Baltimore Catechisms and Latin devotions were readily embraced. Roman style clerical dress and/or religous habits were the norm.
In heading the Holy Father’s wisdom that we re-explore our own heritage and renew and return to some of our older venerable devotions like the Akathist hymn, and parochial celebration of the office like vespers and matins rather than supplant them with things like Stations of the Cross, a Byzantine version of Eucharistic adoration and the rosary, some have sort of hijacked the directives and made them to sound as though Greek Catholics were to no longer be concearned with anything that might be viewed as “too Latin.”
One party of disaffected RCs
cum Melkites tried to explain to me that *Humanae Vitae *was of no concern to us because it was issued by the “
Latin Patriarch in a pastoral letter to
his (Latin) faithful.” The implication being that we could pick and choose what was coming from Rome by dismissing what we did not care for as being “for the Latins.”
For my own private devotion to the Rosary and my efforts to be faithful to the Holy Father, these folks routinely excoriated me as being “Latinized” - the ultimate insult in their parlance. “You are being too Latin! You are thinking like a Latin now!”
It is especially important for tradition lovers of all stripes to head this warning: In the Greek Catholic Church, our venerable traditional liturgy has not preserved us from some of these folks. And some of the most vocal dissidents in our church also have the longest beards and kiss the most icons.
Form alone does not guarantee orthodoxy or preclude dissent.
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