“In my Father's house are many mansions.” (John 14:2)
On Sunday, the Davises paid a visit to the local Melkite parish.
Of all the Eastern Catholic churches, the Melkites are the most ardent “traditionalists”—only they’re Byzantine traditionalists. Since returning to full communion with Rome, they’ve strenuously resisted Latinization. They cling to their ancient Eastern customs, liturgical, spiritual, and theological.
They cross themselves right to left. Few of them pray the Rosary; instead, they meditate on the Jesus Prayer with a prayer rope. When they recite the Creed, they omit the filioque (“… who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son…”). Normally, they don’t normally kneel during Mass, which I thought was kind of weak… until I learned that they keep Great Lent.
Their children are confirmed and communed immediately after baptism. Their altars are hidden by iconostases. Eucharistic Adoration is practiced rarely, if ever. And they use leavened bread for Holy Communion, symbolizing the risen Lord. (It’s delicious.)
The Melkites’ primate, Gregory II Youssef, was the most vocal opponent of papal infallibility at Vatican I. When the Council promulgated Pastor Aeternus, the Melkites simply left Rome. Gregory was finally convinced to sign the dogmatic constitution, though he inserted a proviso: “except the rights and privileges of Eastern patriarchs”—language he borrowed from the Council of Florence.
A few months ago, my friend David and his family left the Roman Church to officially join the Melkite Church. “It’s great,” he tells me. “It’s just like being Orthodox, except you’re not in schism.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration… but only a bit.
And you know what? I think that’s fantastic.
One of the things I love about being Catholic is the Church’s diversity. It really is a catholic Church, a universal Church. That’s why there’s a Catholic version of every rite in the Eastern Orthodox Church. (Cardinal O’Malley’s cathedral has an Alexandrian Ge’ez liturgy, which comes from the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church.)
Then you’ve got the dozens more rites that are unique to us. There’s the the Ambrosian Rite from Milan and the Syro-Malabar Rite from India. Many religious orders have their own rites, too: the Carmelite Rite, the Dominican Rite, the Norbertine Rite… the list goes on and on.
Now, thanks to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, we also have the Ordinariate Use, also known (not quite accurately) as the Anglican Use.
The Ordinariate Use adapts much of the Book of Common Prayer to the traditional Roman Rite. Its priests are permitted to use the King James Version of John 1 for the Last Gospel. It has its own Daily Office, which includes the Coverdale Psalter. It also publishes the shorter St. Gregory’s Prayer Book, which contains prayers and poems from Anglican luminaries like Jeremy Taylor, John Keble, and Edward Pusey.
The Vatican’s recent moves to squelch the “Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite” (i.e., the Latin Mass) unsettle me, as I’m sure they do many of you. Yet I try to bear in mind that, for the last couple of centuries, the Church has been moving towards a kind of pan-traditionalism. So many of these ancient, living Christian churches are being grafted back onto the “trunk” of Rome.
These traditions are flourishing, and we Romans are better for having them with us.
It’s not just the liturgy, either. Even in the Roman Church, there’s an unbelievable variety of spiritual traditions as well.
First, there are the different “schools” that arise from the different religious orders. Sometimes, if you get someone from the Franciscan school talking to someone from the Dominican school, it seems like they’re talking about two different religions (but in a good way) (mostly). Yet each culture has its own traditions as well.
For instance, I just got finished editing two vastly different books from two vastly different traditions, yet both of which benefited me immensely. The first is Beautiful Holiness by Kathleen Beckman. It’s a study of Concepción Cabrera de Armida, better known as Blessed Conchita. The second is tentatively titled The Poetry of the Mass. Many of you will know its author, Fr. Michael Rennier. He’s a columnist for Aleteia and a contributing editor to Dappled Things. The Poetry of the Mass is a beautiful meditation on the Holy Sacrifice viewed through the lens of Father’s conversion story.
Mrs. Beckman’s book is wonderful, and I highly recommend it to all of you—especially all the moms out there. Blessed Conchita was a devoted housewife and mother of nine who also happened to be one of the greatest mystics in the history of the Church. But the book’s spirituality is definitely Latin, if you know what I mean. Conchita was Mexican, and it shows.
That’s not a criticism, of course. Just the opposite. The fact that I got so much out of Beautiful Holiness, despite having so little in common with Blessed Conchita, shows (to me, at least) how deftly the Church adapts to the cultures of the peoples she evangelizes while remaining universal.
Fr. Rennier’s book is quite different. Having been raised Pentecostal, he converted to high-church Anglicanism as a young man and went off to Yale Divinity, where he fell in with a gang of tweedy Anglo-Catholic seminarians. After a brief yet fruitful pastorate in the Episcopal Church, Fr. Rennier was received into full communion with Rome and ordained by Cardinal Burke.
Like the Ordinariate—and Father himself—The Poetry of the Mass flowers from the ancient root of English Catholicism. Yet it would be as useful to a Mexican-American as to a fellow WASP convert like me.
Really, we need both. That’s how catholicity works. We need the foreign to keep us from becoming complacent and the familiar to make us feel at home.
St. Paul said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” This is one of the hardest passages in all of Scripture because, clearly, we are still male and female. We are still Jews and Greeks—and Mexicans, Englishmen, Italians, Arabs, Ethiopians, Indians…
Yet I think a Catholic understands this passage intuitively. The great diversity of our cultures—like the diversity of our rites—is really proof of the Church’s unity, her universality.
Speaking for myself, this is one of the reasons I’ve never questioned my conversion. Like the Melkites, I had no intention of “Latinizing,” and I never had to. I still prefer the King James Version and the Coverdale Psalter. I still read all the same Anglican writers I did when I was an Anglican. I still play CDs of old Anglican hymns sung by Cambridge choirs whenever I get in the car.
And that’s all fine! In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s what the Church wants.
In Anglicanorum Coetibus, Benedict XVI expressed the desire “to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared.”
In other words, the Ordinariates are an attempt to imagine what the English Church would look like, had the Reformation never occurred. So, in a sense, George Herbert and C. S. Lewis are united with John Henry Newman and G. K. Chesterton in a way that none of them could have possibly imagined—not in this life, anyway.
As Pope Benedict XVI made clear, the whole Church is invited to enjoy the fruits of this unity—this “treasure” known as the Anglican patrimony. It’s not just for us ex-Anglicans. It’s ours and it’s everyone’s. It’s universal. It’s catholic.
The Church needs all these different traditions, because they each speak to different peoples and cultures and temperaments. Who knows? The renewal of “English Catholicism” might be the key to winning over the United States.
Walker Percy thought so. In a letter to Caroline Gordon—wife of Allen Tate, the great poet and convert—he wrote:
I agree with you about St. Thomas More. He is, for us, the Road Back. For our countrymen, I mean, for southerners. For More is the spiritual ancestor of Lee. He is the man to pray to for the conversion of the south. One of the stumbling blocks to the Southerner (or the American) who is drawn to the Church is that he sees, not the Church of More, not the English Church which is his spiritual home, but the Church of St. Alphonsus Liguori by way of the Irish Jesuits. If he does go in, he must go in with his face averted and his nose held against this odor of Italian-Irish pietism and all the bad statues and architecture. Of course this is somewhat exaggerated and prideful, because it is a salutary experience in obedience and humility to take St. Alphonsus. (Hell, he was a great saint!) But if Allen is forming a St. Thomas More Society I want in.
As a fellow Anglo convert, I also struggle mightily with the “I love you, Jesus, my love” stuff. I know it works for lots of people, all of whom are much holier than I am. (St. Alphonsus, for one.) But one may convert to Catholicism without converting to Ligourism. The Church is big enough to contain St. Alphonsus and St. Thomas More—and Gregory II Youssef, and Blessed Conchita, and me, and you.
In our Holy Mother’s house there are many, many mansions. Thank God for that.