medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
It would be respectful to avoid the term "Uniate"--it's offensive and takes sides in the, yes, very complicated history involved. "Eastern Rite Catholic" is more appropriate, in part because not all of the Eastern Rites are examples of returning to communion with the Bishop of Rome after the communion had been broken (which is the meaning behind "uniate")--some of the Eastern Rites never broke communion with the Bishop of Rome.
The entire text for the funeral liturgy was available on the Vatican web site--I don't have the exact link, and may still be available there.
The prayers were undoubtedly offered in Greek for the same reason that Latin was used for most of the Western Rite liturgy. If you have participants from a wide variety of languages, unless you want to chop it up into itsy bitzy linguistic parts, which makes no sense whatsoever liturgically or aesthetically, you choose a unifying language and Greek has played that role for many of the Eastern Rite churches.
Yes, if you wanted to reflect accurately the historic families of Eastern Rite churches, the Armenians and Syriac and Coptic and Slavonic families should have had pieces of the liturgy in their languages. But in some sense, even for the Eastern Orthodox, the Greek Church represents an ecumenical point of unity.
Dennis Martin
>>> [log in to unmask] 04/08/05 11:21 PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
One of the more interesting moments for me in the papal funeral was the
lengthy blessing by leaders of the Uniate Eastern Rite churches; Ukrainian
(with its peculiarly labyrinthine history), Maronites among others, I
presume. But I couldn't identify any of them (who was presiding, etc. and I
was wondering why Greek was used since I assumed these churches used Old
Church Slavonic or some other local ancient sacred language. Any info on
this from the membership?
thanks
jbw
John B. Wickstrom
Kalamazoo College
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