The round things on tall wooden rods are called “ripidia”. They have images of the cherubim on them and are used by deacons in a Hierarchical Divine Liturgy.
In many (I hesitate to say “most”) byzantine traditions they are also carried in procession.
For both the Little Entrance and the Great Entrance , we take candles first, and then the ripidia if we have enough servers (although the censer gets carried even before the candles in the Great Entrance). When we still have a server with empty hands, we take the crucifix, too . . .
And then there’s the report of Fr. Vivona snapping, “Just grab anything and carry it!” when he saw a server with empty hands
At Communion, if there are server’s not holding the cloth, they stand outside the iconostasis with first the riparian, and then candles if enough of them. (of course, I’ve recently been contemplating whether either a fielder’s or first baseman’s mit might be a better choice than the cloth . . .
:crazy_face
Also, their origin is as quite literal fans, keeping the flys off the gifts once they were uncovered!
In the italo-greco parish, I’ve seen them used during the anaphora during a regular liturgy.
Is it the deacon or maybe called a cantor that stands behind the congregation and leads them in singing during the liturgy?
That’s the cantor.
Deacons are still hard to find in much of the US (OTOH, I’m not sure I ever went to a Roman liturgy in western PA without one, and the tiny byzantine parish ordained one while I was there).
The liturgy
is notably different when a deacon is there–the priest doesn’t cover all of his parts (nor could he; some are directions to the priest! Others are while the priest does something else).
Here’s what confuses me. The Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church is one of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, right?
That count is kind of fuzzy, so I stick with “about two dozen.” there’s one that last I heard was suspected of being extinct (Georgian?), while the Pittsburgh Metropolia in the US is self governing, but no longer uses the word “ruthenian” (in fact, for some purposes, the Metropolitan is the highest ranking Catholic clergyman in the US, as the head of a
sui juris church [cardinal ranking is another way]). So does the church in RUthenia and ours count as one or two churches?
AFAIK, the Pittsburgh Metropolia is the only
sui juris church descended from another EC church (at least modernly), but I’m not going to stick to that if anyone knows better.
Why is this Church headquartered in America and not Europe?
the European eparchies are not part of our metropolis.
(yes, this kind of needs a scorecard to keep track of . . .)
