Dear Seamus,
I believe your point is overly simplistic. For one thing, a priest friend of mine does have “converts” - but they are ALL traditional RC’s, (about one half of his entire parish) and some of them are as vituperant and vociferous as our TrentCath!
They insist on the Filioque and other traditions which they have brought with them. Frankly, I, for one, don’t see anything wrong with that since it will take them some time to get used to the Eastern Church
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And converts from Orthodoxy are not always “anti-Latin” - Bl. Basil Velichkovsky, the Redemptorist New Hieromartyr wrote in his diary that his Orthodox converts insisted on kneeling on Sundays etc. even when he asked them not to do those things so as to not give scandal to the Orthodox.
Whether one is Ukrainian Catholic or Ukrainian Orthodox from western Ukraine makes no difference - they tend to both have an equal aversion to the Roman Catholic Church in its Polish incarnation as a result of a nasty history in this respect. To this day, the Gregorian calendar will be called the “Polish calendar,” Christmas on the 25th is the “Polish holidays” etc.
Now, this doesn’t mean that both UC’s and UO’s won’t have cherished practices that originated in the RC church and are as a result of RC influence. To them, that has nothing to do with the above.
In Poland, however, UGCCers tend to be quite different (and quite Latinized). When immigrants from Poland “take over” a UGCC parish here (as happened to my old parish), one notices the difference - a number of old Latin devotions that the post-World War II immigrants brought with them, but as a result of Vatican II and the “Eastern movement” were dropped over time come back with a vengeance, to wit, First Fridays and Saturdays, Sacred Hearts devotions etc.
“Eastern” UGCC priests and laity will tend to be very critical of devotions that have a Latin Church origin. It doesn’t mean that they “hate things Roman” only that they are zealous about promoting things Byzantine.
The title of this thread, I will add, is tendentious and offensive. Roman Catholics I know, including priest-professors whom one would think would have a more rounded out ecclesial world-view (which world-view they apply to Buddhism and other world religions) have habitually belittled Eastern traditions, again because they really are in the darkness of invincible ignorance about them and, for them, the standard of all that is good is based on the Roman tradition.
It is because the Roman tradition, in varying ways in various EC Churches made itself oppressively felt that one can find a certain aversion to the RC Church itself.
There is a book of photographs I have in my possession by a UGCC photographer who made pictures of the mangled remains of Ukrainian Catholic Churches by . . . Roman Catholics. A particular object of RC hatred is the three-bar Cross and the cupola. One picture depicts a mangled cupola and cross in the middle of a cow field. The photographer also made pictures of EC Churches taken over by Roman Catholics when the UGCC was banned by the soviets (talk about kicking someone when they are down!).
He went into one of these Churches where the iconostasis was removed for the Novus Ordo Mass. But he noticed a three-bar Cross on the cupola and asked the RC parish priest about it. “Oh, really? I never noticed. This Church has been in RC hands for a couple of hundred years at least . . .”
Perhaps the author of this thread might like to review the history of Roman Catholic oppression, cultural and political of the Eastern Catholic Churches before exclaiming “Why do they dislike us so?”
Alex
