Replanting a Great Tree: Learning from the Experience of the Byzantine Catholic Church
As the Roman Catholic Church in the United States increasingly finds itself dealing with the challenge of multicultural liturgy as part of the process of inculturation called for by the Second Vatican Council, the experience of the Byzantine Catholic Church in the U.S.A. (formerly the Greek-Catholic Church) may be instructive. Our church came from an area where the culture supported liturgical practice to an area where the culture challenged that practice. It came from a place where the experience of church was similar, if not uniform, from one town to the next into a place where being Catholic could mean several things and where the dominant form of Catholicism celebrated a liturgy and a devotional life that was at best unfamiliar and, at worst, simply odd. How the Byzantine Catholic Church adjusted to life in the United States and how it faced and resolved some of the cultural and religion challenges that life here offered may offer lessons that are instructive to Roman Catholics in facing some of the challenges of multicultural life and liturgy in this land.
Here's a scenario for you: The church building stands in the middle of the village somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. The life of the village revolves around the services of the church. The rhythms of life on the farm through the changing seasons are intertwined with the fasts and feasts of theYear of Grace. The home, seen as a family church, is consecrated with its icon corner and the lamp which burns there: Days begin and end with prayer, and each meal is made sacred with the grace before and after meals. The life of a family begins with the blessing of the betrothal and then the celebration of the crowning of the couple, continuing with the procession to the house of the couple to bless their marriage bed. When a child is conceived, the woman comes to church to receive the blessing of an expectant mother; after the birth there is a naming ceremony and then the baptism and the churching of the mother. The fields which the family works are blessed each year, as is their house during the celebration of the Theophany of the Lord in January. Christmas and Theophany Eves are also celebrated at home with the special "Holy Supper" fasting meals that begin with the sighting of the first star. The entire village stops working (as much as any farming village can, of course) to celebrate the feasts of the church.
During the Great Fast in preparation for Pascha, the entire tenor of life in the village changes. People are in church much more, eating prayer instead of the food they give up during the Fast. During Great and Holy Week, everything else is laid aside so that the entire populace can enter into the celebration. The night of Pascha is luminous during the procession with the New Light, and everyone carries to the church the baskets of paschal foods which are solemnly blessed after the paschal Divine Liturgy and then feasted upon in the early paschal morning. And when one of the community falls asleep in the Lord, he or she is laid out in the home, and the first service is held in the home, before the body is carried to the church for the waking (with the Psalter being chanted so that the body is never left alone) and the solemn funeral services, followed by the burial in the village cemetery next to the church. Those graves will be solemnly visited and blessed on St. Thomas Sunday, the week after Pascha, in affirmation of the resurrrection of the dead.
Coming to America
That is the kind of environment that Byzantine Catholic shared in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1880s before they came to the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, whole villages of men were hired by steel mills and coal mines to leave their villages and come to the United States. Since work in the villages amounted, for the most part, to subsistence farming, people leapt at the chance to make a decent living for themselves, their wives, and their children. On coming to the United States, they settled in areas devoted to mining and milling: Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, northeastern Ohio, and northwestern Indiana, with pockets of immigrants from the Carpathians in Minneapolis and in Saint Louis. Once they arrived, they could not find their familiar Greek-Catholic Church anywhere. There were plenty of Roman Catholic churches, of course, and even though these Catholics knew themselves to be in communion with the Church of Rome, they were not at home in the Roman Rite. So they saved their pennies and brought their families from Central Europe. Then, after securing the family unit safely in the new country, they saved again, and this time they brought priests and cantors from the old country so that they could worship God according to their Greek-Catholic faith.
These priests -- usually bearded, married, and with children -- caused great upset among the mostly Irish and German bishops of the Roman Catholich Church in the United States. Since the Greek-Catholic Church in Europe was, for the most part, a form of Catholicism found within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roman Catholics from other parts of Europe and the United States were completely unaware of the very existence of other "types" of Catholics in union with Rome. Because of this, many bishops (especially the great hero of "Americanization," Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota) refused to give faculties to Greek-Catholic clergy. This usually meant that Greek-Catholic churches were incorporated, according to the laws of the United States, not as churches but as social clubs for people of Ruthenian descent. This legal maneuver kept the property out of the hands of the local Roman Catholic diocese, but it was to create immense problems down the road.
Transplanting a Tree
Bringing the Greek-Catholic experience to the United States was akin to transplanting a tree by moving it many miles to a new place for replanting, one with different soil and air qualities. One thing that greatly assisted the move was that most Greek-Catholics lived within walking distance of their new churches (though often not a close to their cemeteries). This permitted the church to remain the center of the activities of the people. Schooling, however, was taken out of their hands -- the parish cantor was not longer permitted to be the local school teacher. He did, however, teach catechism and "Russkaya skola", the education program which taught the Rusyn language and customs either on Saturdays or on weekdays after school.
One of the biggest difficulties and Ruthenian immigrants faced was getting time off from the mine or the mill to attend church on holy days and during the Great Fast. Not only were there far more holy days on the Greek Catholic calendar than on the Roman Catholic one, the calendar used to mark these days was the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used by Roman Catholics and the people of the United States. Christmas in the Julian calendar was not December 25 but January 7; Pascha could be as much as five weeks later than the Western observance of Easter.
As time went on and more immigrants learned English, the prevailing Roman Catholic culture often impinged on the practices that the Greek-Catholics had known since childhood. Things like Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the rosary, the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the novenas -- things that Roman Catholics of the time identified as core "Catholic" customs but that were not part of Greek-Catholic devotional life -- made Roman Catholics question the Catholicity of their Greek-Catholic neighbors. Such practices, however, came more and more to be adopted by both Greek Catholic priests and faithful -- sometimes in adapted versions but sometimes brought over wholesale in their Roman form.
In the 1930s, the Greek-Catholic Church in the U.S.A. underwent a massive division as 150,000 of its priests and faithful, protesting the increasing Latinization of the Greek-Catholic Church, split off and entered into communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. One of the effects of this split was to increase the "catholicizing" (read: latinization) of those who remained in union with Rome.
The loss of facility with the Church Slavonic language (the language of the Greek-Catholic liturgical books) made it harder and harder for Greek-Catholics in the United States to maintain the singing of Vespers and Matins in parish churches. The loss of these services and the increased use of the "evening Divine Liturgy" constituted the biggest compromise between traditional Greek-Catholic practice in Europe and "standard U.S. Greek-Catholic" liturgical life.
A Huge Impact
The liturgical changes and wider cross-ritual exploration that followed the Second Vatican Council in Roman Catholic parishes also made a huge impact on Greek-Catholics in the U.S.A. Confronted by Roman Catholic parishes that offered multiple liturgies on weekends, the Greek-Catholics felt forced to abandon their traditional "one altar, one liturgy" practice for multiple weekend liturgies. The practice of shorter Roman Catholic services, too, was a challenge to the traditional -- and lengthy -- celebration of the Liturgy in Greek-Catholic parishes. The constant reinforcement by clergy and religious of the adage -- "We're Catholic first and Greek-Catholic second" -- meant that many of the younger people felt free to abandon their own Church for a nearby Roman parish.
The nadir of the Greek-Catholic liturgical experience in the United States cames in the 1960s and 1970s, when icon screens were ripped out of churches so that they would look more "Catholic" and less "Orthodox." This was done concurrently with an adaptation of the traditional Rusyn plainchant (called "prostopinije") to fit English texts, tragically leading to a rewriting of many ancient melodies by people with little or no understanding of decent English accent or phrasing.
Restoration
Since the 1990s, there has been a steady attempt on the part of the Greek-Catholic Church (now officially known as the Byzantine Catholic Church sui juris in the U.S.A.) to regain its ancient heritage. New churches are built with icon screens, and older churches are having them replaced. There is a new translation of the liturgical services and a more accurate transcription of the plainchant to the English text.
Restoration has included recombining the three initiation mysteries of Baptism, Chrismation, and Eucharist for infant baptism, and (to some extent) restoring immersion as the normal mode of administration of the Mystery. The practice of "first Communion" with all the accoutrements thereof, borrowed from the Roman Rite practice, is slowly being replaced with the custom of first confession at the "age of reason."
Most (though not all) Byzantine Catholic parishes have restored the practice of "non-liturgical days" during the Great Fast -- that is, days when the Divine Liturgy itself may not be celebrated but is replaced on Wednesdays and Fridays of the Great Fast with the "Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts", which is the service of Vespers with an added Communion service with the Holy Gifts consecrated on the previous Sunday. In all four eparchies (dioceses), the celebration of "other Lentern devotions" takes second place to this most important service.
The largest challenges in restoring a healthy Byzantine Catholic liturgical life are found in reducing the multiplicity of Divine Liturgies on a weekend and the need to restore the celebration of Vespers and Matins at least on Sundays and holy days. While parishes are currently locked into several celebrations of the Divine Liturgy for Sundays and holy days for fear of losing parishioners to Roman parishes with more convenient schedules (and thereby, of course, also losing essential funding from collections), the tradition needs to restore a Byzantine schedule where Vespers is celebrated on Saturday night and Matins is celebrated on Sunday followed by Divine Liturgy. This restoration will take conversion of heart on the part of priests as well as people, and it will require the guidance of our hierarchs in this major change.
As is apparent, we are confronting many of the same challenges faced by our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers during the beginning of the third millenium. We firmly believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it has taken flesh in the Byzantine Catholic Church in the U.S.A., has something important to give in witness to the world in which we live. Know that we are with you as we all strive to live the Gospel with integrity and with a desire to share it with all humanity.
Professor J. Michael Thompson, who founded the Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle in Chicago in 1988, is currently a professor ecclesiastical chant at The Byzantine Catholic Seminary of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and director of The Metropolitan Cantor Institute at the seminary.
This article appeared in the April/May 2007 issue of Pastoral Music, a publication of the National Assocation of Pastoral Musicians, and is reprinted here with the author's permission.