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| 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.
