Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

I recently posted on Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church on our companion blog, Churches of the West.  That post is here:

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver ...: This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado. Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", imm...

The entire entry is below, followed by my commentary.

To add what I posted in the entry linked in, as is sometimes the case with Catholic churches, I not only took a photograph, as it was Sunday, I attended there.

I won't say that I attended "Mass", as the Eastern Rite doesn't use that word.  It uses the term Divine Liturgy instead.

Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado.

Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", immediately have what, in the English speaking world, are frequently referred to as "Roman Catholics" in mind.  In fact, however, "Roman" Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics whose churches use the Roman Rite.  Roman Catholics make up the overwhelming majority of Catholics, and indeed the majority of Catholics, on earth.

They aren't the only Catholics however.   The Roman Rite itself is just one of several Latin, or Western, Rites.  There are also several Eastern Rites, of which the Byzantine Rite is one.

The Byzantine Catholic Church, which is also called the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, uses the same liturgical rite as the Greek Orthodox Church and shares the same calendar.  It dates back to the conversion of the Rusyn people in the Carpathians to Christianity in the 9th Century.  That work, done by St. Cyril and St. Methodius brought to the Rusyn people the form of worship in the Eastern Rite.  They Rusyn church initially followed the Orthodox Churches following  the schism of 1054, but in 1645 the Ruthenian Church started to return to communion with Rome, resulting in the Rutenian Byzantine Catholic Church, which is normally called the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States.

Immigration from Eastern Europe brought the Church into the United States. Originally a strongly ethnic church, in recent decades it has become multi ethnic and its strongly traditional character has caused it to obtain new members from both very conservative Latin Rite Catholics as well as very conservative former Protestants.  Indeed, while this church is very small, it has been growing and now has a Byzantine Catholic outreach to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where it holds services in Roman Catholic Churches.

We pick up from there.

When people hear the world "Catholic", they tend to think of what they sometime call "Roman Catholics".  The term "Roman" Catholic is itself a post Reformation English term, which the English tagged on to the Church in their effort to justify the position that the Church of England had a theological basis for separating from the Church.  Serious conservative members of the Anglican Communion still take that position and I suppose that Episcopal clergymen are schooled in it in some fashion, although it appears to be the case presently that the Episcopal Church is ordaining at least some members of their clergy who attend seminaries in a remote fashion, which is very much the opposite of how the Catholic Church does that.*  Anyhow, there aren't really "Roman" Catholics, although in the English speaking world Latin Rite Catholics have themselves adopted the term and don't regard it as a pejorative, as it originally was.

I heard some statistics on it the other day and I won't get them precise, but they were interesting in what they conveyed.  The largest single religion in the world, and in spite of what some modern statisticians might suggest almost all humans are members of a religion, is Christianity.  Christianity is in fact growing in most of the world and only in the rich Western World is there really a more lackadaisical approach to faith.  Even in parts of the globe where Christianity has historically had a difficult time penetrating this is the case.  About 30%, for example, of Koreans are Christians.  While numbers are very hard to come by, good anecdotal evidence suggest that post 9/11 conversions to Christianity in the Middle East rank in in the millions in an area in which open conversion is illegal.  Conversion by Muslims immigrating to some regions of Europe have been so high that they've filled the pews in Churches in some regions that were formally only used by locals.  Both France and Germany, in some areas, have seen large conversions of that type.

Of Christians on Earth, the largest denomination by far, if we want to put it in those terms, are Catholics. Catholics dwarf all other denominations, something that's hard to grasp in the U.S. as the U.S. was and is a Protestant country.  Indeed, of interest there, the U.S. and areas strongly influenced by the US are really the only regions of the world were certain types of Protestantism that refuses to acknowledge that the Catholic Church dates back to Christ in an uninterrupted fashion, although both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches both have uninterrupted Apostolic Succession and can note the same.  That statement surprisingly amounts to fighting words for some Protestant denominations in the English speaking world but in an era in which resources are so easily obtainable it cannot really reasonably be debated by anyone any longer and indeed most of the larger original Protestant churches don't debate that and never have.  The Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is part, for example fully acknowledges that as do all branches of Lutheranism.  Some other branches of the old Protestant world have claimed apostolic succession, thereby recognizing its importance and the Catholic history on it, and others have gone so far as to occasionally find bishops in the Orthodox or Old Catholic faiths who are willing to do ordinations in an effort to clear up any question regarding it, which again acknowledges the position.  The original "protest" wasn't over that, which was always fully acknowledged.  People who insist on debating it are debating a non point, as its indisputable and if a contrary position is a person's only theological point, it's a lost one.

The point on that isn't to start such a debate, but to note something else.  Most Catholics are in the Latin Rite, which actually is several rites, and of these most are in the Roman Rite.  Hardly any Catholic has ever been in a Catholic Church that celebrates another rite.  Something like 80% of the Christians on Earth are Roman Rite Christians and if we include the the Protestants who are familiar with that style of worship, and many do, its even higher.

The percentage of Christians who are Eastern Rite is really small.  If we include both the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics its still only around 10% or less of all Christians. 

But it's growing.

Okay, we've discussed the Great Schism here before and we're not going to go into that, but as we've previously noted, the Eastern Rites of the Church date back to prior to the schism and all Eastern Rite churches use the same forms of worship.  Lost to a lot of people, that means that there are plenty of Catholics, although a small minority of Catholics over all, who worship in the Eastern Rite.

But there are getting to be more.

The Byzantine Catholic Church is more fully referred to as the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.  There's also a Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. The two use the same liturgy and their services would be very similar, but the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church is extremely small and has a different history.

The Ruthenians were one of several Eastern Rite churches that followed Constantinople when the Great Schism occurred.  Indeed most, but not all, of the Eastern Rite did that, reflecting the Eastern Rite's strong association with Constantinople.  Ironically, perhaps, the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church reflected the fact that not everyone in the Eastern Rite in Greece did, and that in fact there remained churches that continued to accept the Bishop of Rome as the head of the church rather than the "first among equals", as the Orthodox have stated it.  The Ruthenian Church, however, did wholly follow Constantinople at first but, in the 17th Century, came back into communion with Rome, something that a variety of Eastern Rite churches have (not all Eastern Rite churches, it should be noted, followed Constantinople even at the onset).  The Church had a presence in the United States since the second half of the 19th Century as Eastern European immigrants brought it over from Eastern Europe. At first it frankly unfortunately had a rocky relationship with the larger Latin Rite, which was in fact attributable the the Latin Rite's view at the time that in a country where Catholics were a minority it was better if everyone who was Catholic was Latin Rite. That view has long since passed however and today the Catholic Church not only encourages the Eastern Rites in the U.S. but discourages anything that would stand to erode them.

Now they're not only not eroding, they're growing.

This is an interesting phenomenon in and part its due to the collapse of conservative doctrine in the old Protestant churches. As conservatives in those churches have found themselves unable to accept the adoption of positions that run counter to what Christians have held for eons, they've looked out at other churches that retain the traditional holdings and nothing is more traditional than the Eastern Rite, be that in the Orthodox or the Catholic spheres.  

Indeed it's the Orthodox who have primarily benefited from this development, and they're aware of it. As we posted here some time ago, the new Orthodox church in Cheyenne holds itself out as an "Orthodox Christian" church, not a "Greek Orthodox" church, which it is.  In fact, as this evolution occurs, those cultural monikers matter less than they did.  The Greek Orthodox in the U.S. hold Divine Liturgy in English.  So does the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.

And like the Orthodox, the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church is also expanding, and in part for the same reason just noted above.  It's not really hard to find at the present time converts in a Byzantine Catholic Church.  In our recent trip we met a very devout parishioner who self declared as a convert.

In addition, however, to Protestants entering the Byzantine Catholic Church, it's clear that Latin Rite Catholics are as well.  And some of this is for the same reason, while some of it is not.

Conservative Roman Catholics who have grown weary of the reforms of the 1970s which seem to hang on in some parishes have, in some instances, gone over to Eastern Rite Catholic churches where the big reforms never took hold.  About the only thing really notable in terms of reforms in Eastern Rite Catholic Churches is that the services are in English, not the original languages.  This is true, however, of the Eastern Rite in general.  Additionally, Eastern Rite Catholics are really serious Catholics, their knowledge boosted by their minority status.  The service we attended was shockingly serious, with the Priest addressing, in what started off as a children's liturgy, the Problem of Evil.  And he addressed it in a remarkably effective fashion.

In recent years there's been a struggle, mostly in the large Latin Rite, over reforms and direction.  It's pretty clear to nearly every observer that those who would take the Church even further in the "spirit" of the 1970s have a losing argument and that this will have a negative effect.  It's also clear, from the slow return to things that predates those developments, that the opposite has a strong positive attraction to many of the Faithful.

In this context, there's lessons to be learned from the Eastern Rite.  It's growing, and its attractive to an element of those in the Latin Rite.  It has conservative, but married, Priests.  This is not to say that the Latin Rite needs to become Eastern, but it shouldn't ignore the positive examples that the Eastern branch is giving.**

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*Indeed, one of the reforms of the Counter Reformation was the introduction of the seminary system in the Catholic Church, as the Church concluded that the Reformation had been caused in part by badly educated clergymen.  That system has existed for the past 500 years and recently its been enhanced in the original direction.  It was common, up until the last couple of decades, to allow very young men, indeed not really young men so much as boys, into seminaries but reflecting social evolution this is no longer true.  Seminarians now are at the college age, at least.

**That example isn't as well received by everyone, I'd note.  In this case, of us four, my son and I were hugely impressed for a variety of reasons.  My wife and daughter were not.  In that latter example, they frankly found it just too foreign.

In speaking with a colleague who was a cradle Catholic, who fell away from Christianity in college, who re found it in the form of Evangelical Protestantism late in college, and then came back to the Catholic Church as a lawyer, he'd experienced the same thing in a different fashion.  Noting what I noted above, he studied the early history of the church and found that it was in fact, as is clearly demonstrable, "Catholic and Apostolic" and therefore briefly went into the Greek Orthodox church which can legitimately claim to be Apostolic (with the Orthodox and the Catholic church separated by a schism, something that's severe, but not as severe as the gulf between them and Protestant churches).  Anyhow, his wife had been raised in a Protestant church, as was mine, and she was likewise shocked by how foreign the Eastern Rite is.  In contrast, the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Gillette, Wyoming is made up completely of converts from an Evangelical Protestant church that converted after engaging in a study of the early church.