We have a Maronite Priest in our Roman Catholic parish. He says they honor the Pope and follow the Vatican rules. He says the Mass exactly as any other priest and once said in Arabic, the way Jesus would have. Probably the biggest difference is that if a man is previously married, he can then become a priest, which is the case for this one, but remember that was also the case for Romans as well and that changed due to the delema of the Church having to support wives and children as well as the priests.
Welcome to the forum, Justabutterfly.
Just a little note: I’m not sure what you mean by “he says the Mass just as any priest would”, but the Maronite service (at least traditionally) is not the same as the service that Latin Catholic priests say. The liturgical and spiritual heritage of the Maronite Church is in the Syriac tradition which flourished in the early years of our faith in centers such as Edessa and Antioch, in modern Turkey. Liturgically, dialectically, and I suppose also socio-politically, the Maronites are what could be called “West Syriacs”, as they were found mostly within the Byzantine empire, as opposed to the “East Syriacs”, e.g., those Christians who used a Syriac liturgy within Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the Persian empire (represented by today’s Catholic Chaldeans and Syro-Malabarese, as well as the non-Catholic ‘Church of the East’/Assyrians). This might seem so much arcana, but it is important to understand in order to understand the context of this thread and the OPs question.
Also, Jesus would not have worshiped or done anything else in Arabic. Arabic as we know it only developed several centuries after the earthly ministry of Christ. The language you are looking for is called Aramaic, which was the common language of the Near East in Jesus’ time an for some time before and afterward, and is the parent language of Syriac, the language used in the liturgies of all Syriac Christians (Catholic and Orthodox) which is itself the parent language of several very small, endangered modern forms of the language collectively known under the umbrella term of “Neo-Aramaic”, which maintains certain distinctive traits that allow the attentive listener to tell something (most likely) about the speaker’s geographical origin, communal affiliation, etc.
Some examples might help clear this up, so here are a few:
“Come in Peace”, sung in Syriac, from the Maronite Qurbono (Qurbono is the word used by West Syriac Christians to mean “Mass” or “Liturgy”, though you can hear them use those words sometimes, too. The script that you see at the bottom of the screen is the Syriac script in its Western form known as Serto. Syriac has three main scripts)
A part of the Syriac Orthodox Qurbono, performed in India (These people are Syriac Orthodox Christians in the Indian state of Kerala, not in communion with Rome but still using the same form of the language as the Maronites do, to the extent that either community uses the language. Neither the Maronites nor the Orthodox Keralites speak any form of this language natively; the Maronites did until relatively recently, though it is still debated whether the Syriac Indians did, given their mixed and disputed ethnic origins. It is likely that they never spoke it natively, and have always spoken Dravidian languages common to South India. Today, the vast majority of Orthodox Christians in India speak Malayalam, which they also use in their liturgies.)
Here is a short clip of the Chaldean Qurbana (The Chaldeans are the indigenous Catholic church of Iraq, and use the Eastern form of the Syriac language in their liturgies.)
Here is the Vespers prayers in a Syriac Orthodox monastery in Holland (These are also members of a church not in communion with Rome, also using the West Syriac dialect, but unlike the Indians posted earlier these people probably
are native speakers of some modern form of the language, most likely descended or emigrated from southern Turkey, an area called Tur Abdin or “Mount of the Worshipers [of Christ]” which is home to the oldest continuously inhabited Syriac monasteries in the world.)
Just for further comparative purposes, here is a
psalm sung in Arabic. The language has quite a different cadence than any form of Syriac, Aramaic, etc. (nonetheless, the languages are all related, so one might pick out many words of common origin, though I suspect it would be much easier for a Syriac speaker to pick up Arabic than the other way around, for mostly sociolinguistic/political reasons).
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