Communion in Diversity – The Other Churches

By Artur Suski, S.J.

Credit: http://thehouses1.blogspot.com

A Roman Catholic priest walks into an elementary class and leads the students in prayer. He asks all to begin with the sign of the cross, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. He quickly notices that one of the girls in the class crossed herself the wrong way. “No, dear, we cross ourselves from left to right – you’re doing it wrong.” The priest continued to come to that class for a number of years and every time he used the opportunity to correct the girl’s “wrong way of crossing herself.” In reality, she was of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. This and many similar stories are known to many of us. Alas, this true story, which took place in the 1950s in the US, exemplifies the lack of acceptance, and to some extent, the lack of respect, for the non-Latin rites in the Catholic communion before Vatican II.

No Fire Can Stop a Burning Heart!

By Artur Suski, S.J.

Credit: http://flickr.com

“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!” (Job 1:21)

For some time now, I’ve been regularly attending Saturday night Vespers and the occasional Divine Liturgy at a Byzantine Catholic parish not too far from Guelph, Ontario: St. Elias Ukrainian Catholic Church in Brampton. I initially went out of curiosity. I was brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition and my exposure to other Catholic traditions was close to nil. In fact, for a very long time I thought that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was like the Polish Church – they have mass, like our Polish mass, but in Ukrainian! This was the extent of my familiarity with the Byzantine tradition until about four years ago, when I had the chance to study early Church history, especially the development of liturgy in the East and West.

Some of you may have heard on the news recently that St. Elias Church was completely devoured by fire on April 5, 2014. When I found out about the disaster, I went into a state of shock for about half an hour. The magnitude of the disaster didn’t truly sink in until I had the chance to make the rounds of the remains of what used to be the Church. It was heart wrenching. I cannot truly put into words what I felt. All I can say is that it was difficult to face the truth.

Advent in the East and West

By Artur Suski, S.J.

Credit: http://www.familylifeministry.atlanta.goarch.org

In an address to the Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic bishops in 2001, Pope John Paul II said that “the Church breathes with the two lungs of the Eastern and Western traditions.” A few years earlier, in Ut unum sint, we hear the same call: “The Church must breathe with her two lungs!” (# 54) But how are we to understand the Pope’s words? Are we all to become bi-ritual? I don’t think that is what the Pope had in mind. The Pope spoke of the whole Church. Given this context, the Pope wanted to point out that the Catholic Church has been dominated primarily by the Latin tradition. A balance must be restored. Both the East and the West ought to learn about the other and they ought to be faithful to their own respective traditions.