I was looking on wikipedia recently and I discovered there are 2 Catholic patriarchs of Antioch - 1 is Melkite Catholic and the other is Maronite Catholic.
My question is why does the Catholic church hold 2 parrallel patriarchs of Antioch? Is this intentional or is this in the process of being resolved?
Do Melkite Catholics or Maronite Catholics on this forum see both Catholic groups merging in the future?
God bless.
I don’t know if this helps, but it is okay to have multiple bishops of different Ritual Churches have jurisdiction over the same place.
It isn’t permitted to have, say, two Latin Bishops over a territory, but it is okay to have one Latin, one Maronite and one whatever-else over a place.
Bishops of different Rites can have the same geographical territory. It’s just that their jurisdictions only cover the members of their Rite. For example, you can have several Catholic Bishops of New York, but they’d all need to be of different Rites and though their jurisdictions overlap geographically, they do not overlap in terms of the faithful. Violating that through disputes would be unhealthy toward the Church’s universal nature.
Or, you could have one Latin Bishop of New York, one Maronite Bishop who covers the whole East Coast, one Melkite Bishop who covers the whole US and one Ukrainian Bishop who covers the whole North America; again, even though their territories overlap, they’re only responsible for their own Rite.
I wonder, though, how Rome comes to play in all of this. Like, I would imagine that you can’t have an Eastern Church covering the territory of Rome. If you did, it would practically imply that this Eastern Bishop is also the Bishop of Rome. Even if that Bishop never claimed to be as such, and no Bishop in that position would ever dare, I don’t think it’s at all allowable to permit. Would the Pope, or perhaps the Congregation for Oriental Churches, have jurisdiction instead?
Then, we can surmise, the Orthodox Churches could very well come in and make their own Pope in Rome. We do have a Latin counterpart to the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem. There used to be the same thing for Constantinople. Theoretically, the Orthodox could create a Patriarchate in Rome. Of course, that hasn’t ever been done, and the mutual respect between Rome and the Orthodox Churches simply would never make that a possibility.
Aside from that, it’s really impractical for the Melkite Patriarch to have to cover the Maronite Church as well. The Melkite Patriarch would have been brought up in distinctly Melkite customs and traditions; frankly he wouldn’t be qualified to run the Maronite Church, and vice versa – and that’s not even including the work one patriarch would undergo administering his own Church. I’d imagine that administering to two whole Churches would simply be humanly impossible.
As for whether this is a mistake that is destined to be resolved, the answer is no. It’s not just because the Patriarchs each head their own very different Churches, but Rome is extremely unlikely to demote a Patriarchate into a Major Archbishopric or Metropolinate or whatever. If anything, there probably will be even more Catholic Patriarchs of Antioch in the future, as we return in Communion with the East.
