a pilgrim:
BTW - another of the sacred traditions of the Eastern Catholic Church that we may soon see a return to in the USA is (dare I say it?) married priests!
If I may, let me clarify this statement of mine…
By my using the term “
return to in the USA,” I may have given the impression that married priests were, at one time, accepted practice in the Eastern Catholic Churches in America - this has
NEVER been the case.
When the Eastern Catholics first arrived in America, they gathered amongst themselves, mostly in the coal and steel areas of the Northeast, and attempted to form parishes for worship purposes, even going so far as to purchase land and erect church buildings - the only thing lacking were priests! The call went out to the “old country” to send priests familiar with the rites and traditions of Eastern Catholic worship to fill these positions. Many priests gladly volunteered to embark upon this grand journey to the “new country” to minister to the needs of their brothers and sisters here. The vast majority of these priests were married men, a
fully-acceptable practice with regard to Eastern Catholics according to the Holy See.
It must be remembered that, at that time, there was no Eastern Catholic heierarchy in place in America, so the Eastern Catholic priests who showed up on our shores were subject to the rule of the
Roman Catholic bishops within in their geographical areas. These bishops, ignorent of Eastern Catholic tradition and wanting to avoid the “scandal” of married Catholic priests, had virtually
all of these priests shipped back to the old country (except for a couple of old widowers), literally stranding an entire population of Catholic faithful without priests to minister to them.
Not wishing to forfeit their religious rites and customs, most of these abandoned faithful refused to join the Latin Rite churches in their communities (the Latin Rite being totally foreign to them) and instead chose to sever their Catholic ties with Rome by joining the Orthodox Church in America, whose rites and traditions were virtually identical to those they were familiar with and forced to abandon. Estimates with regard to the number of Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic faithful alone who felt abandoned by Catholicism and sought out the “protection” of the Orthodoxy place that number as high as 225,000 faithful! In fact, it has been said that by denying the Eastern Catholics in America their rightful place within the body of the Church, the Catholic Church herself unwittingly served as the
single largest missionary for Orthodoxy in America! Ready-made congregations and parishes, in many cases complete with church buildings, changed hands literally overnight, lost to Catholicism.
…but this is all a matter for a different thread…
Thank you for allowing me the clarification!
a pilgrim