medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Saturday, April 9, 2005, at 10:00 am, Dennis Martin wrote:
> It would be respectful to avoid the term "Uniate"--it's offensive
> and takes sides in the, yes, very complicated history involved.
As someone who has tried to be careful in his public uses of the
term "Uniate", I do appreciate that the history here is very
complicated. But it is also true that the term has a fairly precise
significance (churches returning to communion with the Bishop of Rome).
When used that way it can indeed involve taking sides. E.g. in the
case of Greek Melkite Catholic Church, whose view of its history is
that it is the church of Antioch returned to communion with the Bishop
of Rome and that the Orthodox Melkite Church is schismatic. That I
believe is also the position of the Bishop of Rome (though perhaps less
baldly put) and who better than that bishop to decide who has returned
to communion with him? I.e., to decide who is "Uniate" and who is
not. Whether this is a term of acclamation, neutrality, or opprobrium
depends on the point of view of the user and cannot be inferred from
the mere presence of the term itself.
On another hand, I don't see where taking sides comes into a
characterization of the Italo-Albanian Church, whose origin lies
chiefly with Albanian communities of Orthodox persuasion who arrived in
Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In that sense, it is a
Uniate body, even though whatever remnant congregations of the
medievally more numerous Italo-Greek Catholics were at the time still
Byzantine-rite were also included within the purview of Benedict XIV's
pronouncements beginning the regularization of this church within the
Roman fold.
Best,
John Dillon
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