What influenced your decision to become an Eastern Catholic after being originally Latin?

[ConstantineTG]

They haven’t replaced their ancient hymns with guitar music and hand clapping.

Its actually forbidden to use any kind of instruments. Only our voices can be the instruments to worship God. So even the pipe organ that Latins love so much has no place in a Byzantine church.

 

[rben20]

I didn’t become an Eastern Catholic but I am certainly drawn to it… initially from my love for iconography and the Divine Liturgy. I don’t think I will eventually become an Eastern Catholic but learning about the Eastern traditions and Saints made me love my own traditions and Saints as a Roman Catholic. Discovering and appreciating the TLM, gregorian chant etc. of Traditional Roman Catholicism would have never happened had I not been drawn to the tradition of my Eastern brethren first. Unfortunately it’s hard to come by either traditions today when compared to more prevalent modern NO Masses and churches.

 

[Vico]

…
Abstinence from meat on other Fridays is strongly recommended by the USCCB but universally ignored.

It is recommended because it is the easiest way to fufill the penitential Friday obligation of canon 1251.

USCCB Complementary Norm: Norms II and IV of Paenitemini (February 17, 1966) are almost identical to the canons cited. The November 18, 1966 norms of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on penitential observance for the Liturgical Year continue in force since they are law and are not contrary to the code (canon 6).

From Nov 18, 1966:

“3. Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence as binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.”

nccbuscc.org/norms/norms.htm

Canon 1251 – Abstinence from eating meat or another food according to the prescriptions of the conference of bishops is to be observed on Fridays throughout the year unless they are solemnities; abstinence and fast are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and on the Friday of the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Canon 1253 – It is for the conference of bishops to determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence and to substitute in whole or in part for fast and abstinence other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety.

trosch.org/for/the/abs-clws.htm

 

[Cecilianus]

It is recommended because it is the easiest way to fufill the penitential Friday obligation of canon 1251.

USCCB Complementary Norm: Norms II and IV of Paenitemini (February 17, 1966) are almost identical to the canons cited. The November 18, 1966 norms of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on penitential observance for the Liturgical Year continue in force since they are law and are not contrary to the code (canon 6).

From Nov 18, 1966:

“3. Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence as binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.”

nccbuscc.org/norms/norms.htm

Canon 1251 – Abstinence from eating meat or another food according to the prescriptions of the conference of bishops is to be observed on Fridays throughout the year unless they are solemnities; abstinence and fast are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and on the Friday of the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Canon 1253 – It is for the conference of bishops to determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence and to substitute in whole or in part for fast and abstinence other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety.

trosch.org/for/the/abs-clws.htm

The parts I bolded were what I meant when I called the Friday abstinence “strongly recommended”; since the canons 1251 and 1253 left the implementation up to the conference of bishops my conclusion is that there is (unfortunately) no penalty of sin if someone does not actually do any penance on Fridays.

 

[Heffner]

I’m curious about what influenced some people who changed rites. I’m interested in the East at the moment and I’m wondering what has influenced and attracted some westerners to the east.

I have never become an Eastern Catholic although I have attended the DL just about every day of holy obligation for the last 10 years or so. I think most of the reasons I still also attend the Mass and remain a Latin Rite Catholic are local and they include:

1. Most members of my Eastern Rite church are angry/extreme Latin Rite Catholics. If they were all cradle Eastern Rite Catholics I think the parish would have a far different feel.
2. There is a definite inferiority complex with regard to the West. A constant need to denigrate the Latin Rite. This might well stem mostly from #1.
3. Tiny parishes have their advantages, but this also have big disadvantages.
4. The Latin Rite feels more masculine in some difficult to define way. There is also the traditionally “bitchy” (please pardon me, it’s a quote) quality of the East as described by Harry Crocker in his book Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic that I do not like.

The reason I attend the DL is because I love the DL. No, not more than the Mass, likely not even as much but I still love it. It’s very special to me.

 

[Heffner]

Yes, but most Roman Catholics are not Traditional Catholics, unfortunately - just a small minority.

That almost sounds like a Protestant sect of some kind?

 

[Vico]

The parts I bolded were what I meant when I called the Friday abstinence “strongly recommended”; since the canons 1251 and 1253 left the implementation up to the conference of bishops my conclusion is that there is (unfortunately) no penalty of sin if someone does not actually do any penance on Fridays.

True. There is no USA obligation to practice penance on Fridays outside of Lent for the Latin Church, yet Friday remains a day of penance, and we are urged to do penance, particularly abstinence.

 

[Shin]

Cecilianus:
What drove me the most crazy is that such Thomists absolutely refuse to compromise Thomas’ metaphysics to accomodate the inconvenient findings of modern science, though I have no doubt that Thomas himself with his love for truth would have been the first to do so. Nor are they able to explain his physics in such a way as to make them reconcilable. At first I thought maybe it was just that my philosophy professors weren’t necessarily well versed in either Thomas or physics, but after half an hour talking to Fr. Benedict Ashley during a vocations retreat at his priory - he is one of the most well-respected Thomist theologians alive today, who has done work in both medical ethics and Aquinas’ First Way - I had to conclude that the Thomist metaphysics itself was incompatible with what I know is true physically.

Not to divert too much but could you for a moment expand on that in detail? I’m curious as I’ve been pondering this subject.

 

[ConstantineTG]

That almost sounds like a Protestant sect of some kind?

Definitely. Many traditionalists aren’t even Catholic. To be Catholic you would need to be in communion with your Bishop who in turn is in communion with the Pope of Rome. A number of traditionalist deny the validty of the current Pope, therefore they are not Catholic.

 

[Cecilianus]

Definitely. Many traditionalists aren’t even Catholic. To be Catholic you would need to be in communion with your Bishop who in turn is in communion with the Pope of Rome. A number of traditionalist deny the validty of the current Pope, therefore they are not Catholic.

I wasn’t referring to either sedevacantists or even SSPXers; most Traditionalists are in full communion with and obedience to the Pope of Rome. A Traditionalist is someone who preserves the Faith intact, both doctrinally and liturgically (though it’s a distinction relevant only to the Roman Rite, since we never had a Novus Ordo).

 

[cgvnau]

I am still a Latin Rite Catholic, but I am seriously considering switching to Melkite.
I started going to the Divine Liturgy at St Ignatios because my daughter and I went once out of curiousity and liked that as opposed to the local Latin parishes people actually acknowledged our existence. That was why I started going, but not why I am considering changing.
I have always really liked Icons and so that was a plus. What really got me what the constant, forthright emphasis on the union of Heaven and Earth in the Divine Liturgy. Those prayers are there in the Mass, but the words and the emphasis are in a way that it is not taught nor is it really ever explicitly said.

 

[ConstantineTG]

I wasn’t referring to either sedevacantists or even SSPXers; most Traditionalists are in full communion with and obedience to the Pope of Rome. A Traditionalist is someone who preserves the Faith intact, both doctrinally and liturgically (though it’s a distinction relevant only to the Roman Rite, since we never had a Novus Ordo).

I’m just saying that not everyone one who claims the title “Traditionalist Catholic” is even a real Catholic. There are those who are as Catholic as Old Catholics or the Roman Catholic Women Priests.

 

[ConstantineTG]

I have never become an Eastern Catholic although I have attended the DL just about every day of holy obligation for the last 10 years or so. I think most of the reasons I still also attend the Mass and remain a Latin Rite Catholic are local and they include:

1. Most members of my Eastern Rite church are angry/extreme Latin Rite Catholics. If they were all cradle Eastern Rite Catholics I think the parish would have a far different feel.
2. There is a definite inferiority complex with regard to the West. A constant need to denigrate the Latin Rite. This might well stem mostly from #1.
3. Tiny parishes have their advantages, but this also have big disadvantages.
4. The Latin Rite feels more masculine in some difficult to define way. There is also the traditionally “bitchy” (please pardon me, it’s a quote) quality of the East as described by Harry Crocker in his book Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic that I do not like.

The reason I attend the DL is because I love the DL. No, not more than the Mass, likely not even as much but I still love it. It’s very special to me.

One thing I couldn’t figure out about Roman Catholic traditionalists in Eastern parishes is why do they cry foul of a Roman Mass in the vernacular, but readily accepts the Divine Liturgy in English?

 

[Cecilianus]

Not to divert too much but could you for a moment expand on that in detail? I’m curious as I’ve been pondering this subject.

It would be difficult to do so with brevity or without getting off-topic, but basically modern science (following Duns Scotus) treats matter as actual (rather than potential, as it was for Thomas and the Aristotelians) and explains how things work and why things happen the way they do by their parts - ultimately, by their chemical and physical behavior. Ultimately, explanations boil down to observables or eigenstates, which are governed by eigenvalue equations, rather than substantial and accidental forms at the macroscopic level. Final causality is done away with entirely, and replaced with the principle of inertia (or with the Feynman path integral, if we want to get down to the quantum level - that’s actually the quantum analogue to the principle of least action, but it’s what predicts the motion of a body at the quantum level, answering the same question Aristotle tried to with final causality). Scholastic terminology can provide tools that might be useful for understanding phenomena at a basic level, but you just can’t apply terms like “substantial form” and “quiddity” to quarks and fields. Nor does scholasticism have any explanatory power - saying that something behaves the way it does because of its form simply repeats the question. “Form” is not a reality or thing; it is just a synonym for a description.

As Sir Isaac Newton said,

To tell us that every species of things is endowed with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects, is to tell us nothing: but to derive two or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in philosophy.

As a physicist (my field in college is theoretical astrophysics) I must reject the idea taught by my philosophy professors that matter is unknowable (since matter or energy is precisely what I study), and I have no use for any other use of the term “matter”. If you want the term to mean something else, find a different word for it. That way you will avoid confusing the two meanings of the term as Aquinas did when he argued that angels must pure form because they are immaterial. “Matter” is and should be a univocal term in English.

Secondly, as a physicist I must reject the dream that one can derive theological metaphysics from physics. You can’t. Physics (real physics, that is) says absolutely nothing about God. Even Big Bang cosmology says nothing about God - we don’t have a universally accepted theory of quantum gravity yet and so we don’t know anything about the first 10^-43 seconds, but the evidence is pretty strong that the universe either had a point in time, or if you accept Hawking-Hartle solution to the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation (a proposed relativistic version of the Schrodinger Equation) the universe was timeless and had 4 spatial dimensions, and then one could still ask the question “why is this universe here?” But I see no way to prove that God created the universe based on either scenario, or any way of knowing anything about God by means of this physics. You just can’t do Aquinas’ type of “First Way” arguments - you end up just getting the same cosmological Big Bang history we already know that evolves back into problems with quantum gravity.

This undermines the entire Scholastic order of the sciences, where metaphysics is derived from physics and natural theology builds on metaphysics.

 

[Cecilianus]

One thing I couldn’t figure out about Roman Catholic traditionalists in Eastern parishes is why do they cry foul of a Roman Mass in the vernacular, but readily accepts the Divine Liturgy in English?

For one thing the vernacular is not really a big issue with RC traditionalists; it’s the radical alteration of the words and structure of the Mass, the ascetic laxity, and the theological point of view taught by Vatican II and the much more radical theological liberalism that became rampant in the name of the spirit of Vatican II. I don’t think any traditionalists would really want the Tridentine Mass translated into English, but they would not complain about that nearly as much as the Novus Ordo. RC traditionalists don’t like the Novus Ordo in Latin any more than any other Novus Ordo.

Also, the vernacular versus Latin issue was a major point of contention during the Protestant Revolt, and I think most “Latin exiles” recognize that the Divine Liturgy was never said in Latin and that there is a longer tradition of saying it in the vernacular than there is in the West.

I also think that most “Latin exiles” (and I include myself in this category - I was a Roman Catholic traditionalist who fell in love with Byzantium) would much prefer the Liturgy in a sacred language, Greek or Slavonic. We’re not adamant enough about it to riot in the middle of the service as the Greek congregation did less than a week ago when their Metropolitan started reading the Old Testament reading in demotike rather than katharavousa, but I would rather learn Slavonic than continue having Liturgy in English. That being said, the liturgical problems in the East (the RDL, the use of English, the pews, the see-through iconostases, and the rampant Latinizations) are of a totally different order than the liturgical problems in the West where I have trouble even recognizing that I am in a Catholic church. (I’m the old-fashioned type of body-soul composite that still needs sacraments and other visible signs to show me spiritual realities - I can’t go to a disco party where they hand out pieces of validly consecrated bread and receive the same spiritual nourishment that I do at a Traditional Liturgy.)

Most “Latin exiles” (not including myself) would probably prefer the Tridentine Mass to the Divine Liturgy - they are Catholics of the Roman Rite, after all, and they have a right to their own spiritual tradition. But one can go from one to the other and still see the same faith, and experience the same bond of faith with the parishioners of either church. That’s not something I can do at a Novus Ordo. We both pray for the Pope of Rome, but there is no visible bond of faith between myself and the congregation at a Novus Ordo Mass, and I feel as out of place as I do in a Protestant congregation. I suspect other Traditionalists experience the same thing, and are hospitable enough guests not to complain about the use of English at Divine Liturgy.

 

[Cecilianus]

I’m just saying that not everyone one who claims the title “Traditionalist Catholic” is even a real Catholic. There are those who are as Catholic as Old Catholics or the Roman Catholic Women Priests.

Of course.

 

[Cecilianus]

That almost sounds like a Protestant sect of some kind?

Absolutely nothing Protestant about us - that’s a slander I’m tired of hearing. True Traditionalists - represented by sacerdotal societies like the FSSP and the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest - are 100% obedient to the Pope of Rome, and they preserve the integrity of the Catholic Faith completely intact when the rest of the members of the Church have been both externally and internally Protestantized and modernized. And we do so with the blessing and encouragement of the Holy See.

 

[Shin]

It would be difficult to do so with brevity or without getting off-topic, but basically modern science (following Duns Scotus) treats matter as actual (rather than potential, as it was for Thomas and the Aristotelians) and explains how things work and why things happen the way they do by their parts - ultimately, by their chemical and physical behavior.

Thanks for that nice compact summary Cecilianus. Food for thought!

I had a friend who was pursuing a vocation in the Dominicans who had beforehand been studying for a doctorate in physics, too bad he still isn’t around I’d hand the difficulties over to him too, and watch the quarks fly.

 

[Cecilianus]

I have never become an Eastern Catholic although I have attended the DL just about every day of holy obligation for the last 10 years or so. I think most of the reasons I still also attend the Mass and remain a Latin Rite Catholic are local and they include:

1. Most members of my Eastern Rite church are angry/extreme Latin Rite Catholics. If they were all cradle Eastern Rite Catholics I think the parish would have a far different feel.

Not necessarily, unfortunately - the only sedevacantist I ever met at an Eastern Rite parish was a cradle Ukrainian Catholic. It depends on the parish, but a lot of people who transfer to the East (and actually come to identify themselves as Byzantine) actually come from the Novus Ordo and even strongly dislike the Tridentine Mass. The openness and experimentation and liberalism towards everything at Vatican II did a lot of harm to the Church, but it also did some good, giving the West a renewed appreciation and interest in the East.

1. There is a definite inferiority complex with regard to the West. A constant need to denigrate the Latin Rite. This might well stem mostly from #1.

In most parishes this stems more from the history of forcible Latinizations and hostility on the part of the West (e.g., Archbishop Ireland), as well as the abysmal ignorance many Roman Catholics still have towards the East. I am constantly having to explain that I am fully Catholic and not a schismatic Orthodox. Fortunately this started to change as part of the general reform movement of which Vatican II was a part (I phrased it like that because it was actually Pius XII shortly before Vatican II who began commanding us to “convert the Latins to a love and appreciation of the Eastern Rites”, an injunction that was repeated several times by Blessed John Paul II). We still have a long way to go, however, before the Western Church in general understands Byzantine Catholicism as well as all Byzantine Catholics are familiar with the Western Rite.

1. Tiny parishes have their advantages, but this also have big disadvantages.

1. The Latin Rite feels more masculine in some difficult to define way. There is also the traditionally “bitchy” (please pardon me, it’s a quote) quality of the East as described by Harry Crocker in his book Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic that I do not like.

The East is indeed very feminine. Can you please explain the “bitchy” quality a bit more - or give a quote from Crocker (I don’t have the book on hand)? I might be able to see something like that - we know we are Orthodox and we aren’t going to deviate from that one iota, and we are left bewildered by the constant experimentation in the West - but I’m not sure that’s what Crocker was getting at.

The reason I attend the DL is because I love the DL. No, not more than the Mass, likely not even as much but I still love it. It’s very special to me.

Likewise, the Roman (Tridentine) Mass is very special to me - although I cannot practice it on the same Sunday as I go to Divine Liturgy, I have kept a special place for it in my heart.

 

[Cecilianus]

Thanks for that nice compact summary Cecilianus. Food for thought!

I had a friend who was pursuing a vocation in the Dominicans who had beforehand been studying for a doctorate in physics, too bad he still isn’t around I’d hand the difficulties over to him too, and watch the quarks fly.

Actually, those would be mesons flying, since QCD is a confining theory!

Just giving you non-physics majors a hard time.