Melkite Catholic Patriarch Maximos IV Sayegh: Latins, Orthodox and Eastern Catholics (1963)

After Met Antony Bashir published a rather negative assessment of the Melkite Catholic Church in 1957, it is interesting to see that in 1963 the Word magazine, under his direction, published a lengthy essay about Eastern Catholic identity by the Melkite Catholic Patriarch Maximos IV Sayegh. There can be little doubt that this is a sign of the rapidly warming ecumenical relations during the Second Vatican Council, and much of what the patriarch says foreshadows the Balamand Document and Zoghby Initative of later decades. Reading it today, however, what stands out the most is just how much Maximos IV's outlook contrasts with the position of the current Melkite Catholic patriarch, Youssef Absi, who last year declared that "in dogma and canon law, we are Catholics, and in liturgy and sacramental life we are Byzantines"-- precisely the attitude that the essay below laments as as "uniatism"!

The following is taken from The Word / Al-Kalemat vol. 7, issue 2 (February 1963), pp. 4-9, accessed through the The Hoda Z. Nassour and Herbert R. Nassour Jr., MD, Archive of Lebanese Diaspora, here.

 

 

Latins, Orthodox and Eastern Catholics

A discussion of the Eastern churches and their role in Christian unity

by HIS BEATITUDE MAXIMOS IV

Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and of the Whole East, Alexandria and Jerusalem

Reprinted from "JUBILEE MAGAZINE"

We would not depart far from the truth by saying that the relations between the Roman Church and the various Eastern Churches were not definitively broken until the day when Rome, either losing her patience or giving up hope for a union of all churches, received within her fold a number of Eastern groups, granting them a separate hierarchy and organization. Paradoxically, therefore, it was the partial union of a number of Eastern groups with the Roman See that put an end to efforts directed at an ecumenic union between East and West. 

From these partial unions, following the failure of the Council of Florence, were born several Catholic communities of Eastern rite. In admitting them within the Catholic unity, the Holy See committed itself through the most solemn promises to respect their entire spiritual heritage. The Roman See thought that, while keeping their own rites and discipline, these communities now united with it would become the seed and first fruits of that unity which it one day hoped to restore with the entire East. The manner in which they were treated within the great Catholic family was to be, it was hoped, a guarantee and a model of the treatment held in store in the universal church for all Eastern Christian communities, should the reunion with them be restored.

Unfortunately, it so happened that these Catholic communities of Eastern rite were not always able to fulfill their mission. We must admit on the one hand that they were never fully accepted by the Western Catholics who, as a body, continued to ignore, try, and suspect them. Some went so far as to fight them only in their very homeland. These groups were hardly ever admitted into Catholic unity without reservations, at least on the part of the lower authorities. On the other hand, they themselves were at times so defenseless against the invasion of Western ways and customs that in the eyes of the East they often represented, not an accessible form of union to be achieved in truth and respect, but rather an instance of hidden absorption and almost total Latinization.

We can well raise the theoretical question whether the establishment of these uniate churches was good or bad for the cause of ecumenic union.

But we cannot deny that these churches now exist and that they are even fairly successful. If they have not yet fulfilled all the expectations centered upon them, we should perhaps raise this other question: Did the Orthodox as well as the Catholic world know them well and correctly, and did they help them remain faithful to their vocation?

In our opinion there is only one answer to this question. The Eastern Catholic Churches represent a powerful and indispensable means for the establishment of Christian unity, but only if they maintain, and are helped to maintain, a two-fold and equal loyalty to Catholicism and the East. If they are wanting in either regard, they can only harm the cause of unification.

To bring this point home, we shall first attempt to determine what we Eastern Catholics represent in the eyes of our Orthodox brethren in the East. Secondly, we shall evaluate the difficulties we encounter and the possible success we can hope for in the fulfillment of this vocation of "unifiers" which we believe to be our own.

What we represent in the eyes of the Catholic West

In times past the attitude of our Catholic brethren in the West was characterized by a rather widespread ignorance, a certain irrational distrust or paternalistic regrets; sometimes by a certain disdainful neglect, practical indifference, or calculated exploitation; and, in rare instances, even by hostility. Today, their attitude is marked more and more by respect, understanding and a spirit of cooperation.

Most often the Catholic West ignored us. Even today, the East knows the West better than the West knows the East. With the exception of certain orientalists for whom the East is mostly an object of scientific study, the Catholics of the West, as a whole, are completely or almost completely ignorant of the existence of an Eastern Christendom, of its history, its proper discipline, hierarchic organization, rites, and spiritual heritage. We seem to be a revelation wherever we appear. For the average Western Catholic, we are still "Christians who make the Sign of the Cross backward." Our rites are for him an object of curiosity or scientific interest, nothing more. As a rule, all the orientalists themselves know about the East is its past. Too often, alas, the East represents for the West nothing more than a mummy or a museum piece. Such an attitude, when affecting certain religious leaders, compels them to adopt measures of rigid conservation, suddenly replacing the former attempts at gradual or violent absorption. But few Westerners know much about the life of their Eastern brethren, their practical problems, their immense need of faithfulness as well as of renewal and the great mission they must carry out, despite their weakness, throughout the world.

We must add that this ignorance of the East is understandable enough. The total number of Eastern Catholics is less than 7,000,000. The entire Melkite Greek-Catholic Church is hardly larger than an average diocese in Europe. If quantity was all-important, we would be practically non-existent. But small as our number may be, we feel that a great mission has been entrusted to us and that our first task is precisely to make ourselves known, to narrow the circle of traditional ignorance with which the West still surrounds us.

Occasionally this same ignorance gives rise to a certain irrational and confused distrust toward us, unexplained by the fact that we are "Easterners" and that the West traditionally distrusts the fides graeca. Nor is it that we have deceived the West. Rather, it is an uncontrolled impression born of fear of an unknown mystery and the fruit of a mutual ignorance resulting from isolation. Hence, the responsible Western leaders feel that supervision and control must be tightened more and more. They experience this fear of the unknown. The central authority maintains among us an increasing number of informants whose word, even if it is an isolated opinion, finds with them more credit than is warranted by their personal qualifications.

It seems that many simple souls almost feel sorry that we have not yet become "entirely" Catholic; that is, Latin. For many ecclesiastics who are less simple, the Eastern Catholic Church, or, as it is more commonly called, the "Eastern Rites," represents nothing else but a concession of the Holy See of Rome to the forces of ancestral traditions still alive among the Easterners, an act of condescension, a privilege, an exception. Since one cannot make the Easterners "fully" Catholic, that is, Latin, one must resort to the clever stratagem of tolerating their presence in the Catholic Church, even though they remain "Easterners"; or, in other words, bearing with them as second-rate Catholics. Near the end of his life, a high-ranking churchman disclosed, as in a spiritual last will and testament, that the fifty years he had spent as a missionary in the East enabled him to say that Easterners will never become fully Catholic unless they become Latin. We might think that fifty years in the East have taught this zealous missionary nothing. Alas, how many others still think as he did.  

Some Latin Catholics who live among us in the East establish themselves in certain areas as if we did not exist at all. Not being able to suppress us, they pretend to ignore us. In doing so, they invoke as an excuse the good of souls, compromised, as they say, by our narrow-minded oriental sensitivity or dangerous resistance. They think, for example, that the so-called "Oriental Catholicism" can  be considered in the Catholic Church only an exception, a group of closed communities, allowed at the most to exist but in no way called to expansion. Consequently, these communities are ordered--as once in the Malabar and more recently in Palestine--not to engage in any sort of apostolic activity among the infidels who, in their conversion, are supposed to become members of no other Church but the Latin. These authorities even open the way toward Latinism for non-Catholic Easterners in spite of the existing papal directives and official orders.

In other words, for many Westerners, the real reason why Eastern Catholic Churches should exist and why these uncomfortable "outgrowths" should be tolerated is the fact that, on the one hand, they are an instrument for the "conversion of dissidents," a sort of "bait" through a clever exploitation of the similarity of rites and external organization and, on the other hand, their eventual disappearance would seriously hurt the prestige of the Latin Church.

In rare instances we encounter outright hostility, motivated by political or racial reasons or simply by reasons of competition. In Poland, before the Second World War, the patriotism of the Ukrainian Catholics was questioned by some. Even today, some Latin authorities in America consider the existence of Eastern Catholics with their own clergy, discipline, and rites, as an abnormal and uncomfortable thing; or, at least, a source of problems. We must admit by this very fact of our being Catholic without being Latin, our very presence with a Catholicism almost entirely Latin cannot be anything but uncomfortable. Many Westerners are not yet capable of thinking of unity in terms other than of uniformity. In their opinion, that which is not yet actually absorbed falls short of complete unity. This gives rise within the Eastern Church to a two-fold tendency threatening to divide it ... a massive tendency toward outright and total Latinization and a more conscious but slower tendency toward uncompromised faithfulness to the East, and this for the spiritual advantage of the universal Church herself.

Indeed, a Latinized East, while hardly causing a notable increase in Catholic membership, would no longer represent a valid witness in the eyes of the Orthodox. The incomprehension of our Western brethren is the heaviest price we have paid so far for our ecumenic vocation.

Fortunately, conditions will soon have changed. In the Western Church, ignorance, incomprehension, and occasional hostility have been superseded, especially in recent years, by an immense desire for a more intimate acquaintance with the East, by a sincere will of understanding and by actual cooperation, honest and loyal.

As a matter of fact, the last few years witnessed in the West an admirable flourishing of scientific institutions devoted to oriental research. There exist today many scientific or high-quality popular publications investigating the various aspects of the spiritual heritage of the East, and uncovering these riches for the benefit of their readers. Travel, meetings, conventions, and business give birth to numerous personal contacts between Eastern and Western Catholic. As an Arab proverb says, "we hate only the unknown." A better mutual knowledge will, no doubt, soon result in mutual respect and love between Easterners and Westerners. The younger generation of apostles, imbued with this new spirit, identify themselves more and more thoroughly with the Church they came to serve. Many of the old missionaries sent in auxilium Orientalium were a terrible burden for the East through their attempt at dominating or absorbing it under the pretext of more efficient assistance. The younger generation, on the other hand, comes truly in a spirit of service; adopts the East; and identifies with it, leaving aside all human ambition or hidden motives.

This change of attitude is comforting and promising.

What we represent in the eyes of our Orthodox brethren of the East

Considering now that we represent in the eyes of our Eastern brethren still separated from Rome, we have no choice but to say that the Orthodox East, while knowing us better, remains even harder toward us than the Catholic West.

In countries where the united Eastern communities numerically only represent a small minority, the Orthodox pretend to ignore them.

For most of our Orthodox brethren, "East" and "Roman Catholicism" are contradictory terms. One could not be Oriental and Roman Catholic at the same time.

Very often they still consider us spies and mercenaries serving the political and religious imperialism of the Vatican. The Soviet world tolerate religion in its Orthodox or Latin form but persecutes to death those who dare to be as Oriental as the Orthodox and as Catholic as the Latins while being neither Orthodox nor Latin.

The Orthodox authorities are inclined to consider us as ravaging wolves in sheep's clothing and, consequently, persecute us as the chief agents of Roman proselytism. Those among our Orthodox brethren who, knowing us a little better, refuse to believe that we are capable of such sinister designs, pity us as unwitting victims, who without realizing it, work at strengthening the ambition for supremacy and universal domination which, in their opinion, constantly inspires the Roman Church. At any rate, it is undeniable that our Orthodox brethren feel deeply hurt by what they call our premature, unconditional union, comparable in their minds to a separate peace treaty signed by political powers without the knowledge or approval of their allies.

But let us not dwell any further upon these painful aspects. After all, what people think of us is not the most important thing. The important thing is what we truly are and represent--what we desire to be--and what God expects from us.

What we represent for Christian unity

Superficial minds were capable of saying that the Eastern Catholics--the "Uniates" as they like to call them--are the least fit for promoting any kind of understanding with the Orthodox.

We must frankly admit that this is sometimes exactly the case. As an example, the Greek Church, which would be willing to deal with representatives of the Latin Church and is very favorably disposed toward it, pretends to ignore the very existence of the Hellenic Catholics of Byzantine Rite who, it is true, are of recent origin and few in number. Often legal restrictions are imposed upon them, which is a familiar practice with all religious groups representing a great majority and united with the State.

Careful reflection, however, reveals that this reaction of the Orthodox circles is entirely normal. It is the typical reaction of all Christian groups which refuse to consider any union because they think that any step in that direction is the beginning of disintegration. Union means dying to ourselves to a certain extent. They refuse to accept this death which would open for them the way toward a new life. They fall back upon their spiritual riches but, by the same fact, they give up the possibility of increasing their riches. For all Churches life consists precisely in self-renouncement for the sake of achieving their fullness through unity. It is a mystery of renouncement and death, preceding a mystery of renewal and life.

With this in mind we can easily understand the sometimes very violent reaction of the Churches of the East when from among their own ranks courageous voices arise calling for efforts toward this universalism, when strong but loving hands are outstretched to meet and bring about the necessary renouncement that the body may survive in unity. The united Easterners are like a child warning his older brother against an unsuspected danger. Now, when brothers fight, any stranger seems to be welcome. But in actual fact no one can take the place of the younger brother. No one can understand and love these communities which are still afraid and hesitant as do those who had the courage of preceding them, paying with their own person, upon the road we all must travel sooner or later, in one manner or another if we are fully to rediscover the Truth of Christ.

We must admit, as we carry out our vocation of "unifiers," that several factors work against us. First of all, our "uniatism." This false form of union is a very bad example we give our Orthodox brethren. Our union has been practically an absorption. Every Christian who thinks of union wishes to see it accomplished in such a way that none of the treasures and charisms proper to each Church are lost. The advocates of uniatism have left only the rites of the East untouched ... in every other domain they attempted to take away from the East its best possessions, to give it instead, or impose upon it, what was often less good in the West. The Catholic West, as a whole, has not realized yet with sufficient clarity that, in addition to the liturgical rites, there are in the East other great riches--spiritual, artistic, theological, institutional--to be safeguarded for the benefit of the entire Church. Consequently, it endeavored in the past to destroy everything that did not resemble its own image. We must admit that this attempt was rather successful, for, except for the liturgical rites (and even there...) nothing could resemble the West more than this united East as we find it among the majority of the existing Eastern Catholic communities. Understandably, this model of union does not make our task any easier.

While the responsibility is not ours alone in the matter of this uniatism, some other obstacles to union are directly imputable to us. Very often we lose contact with our Orthodox brethren. We stop caring about them. When we arrive at a certain level of organization, of material and numerical prosperity, we settle down in sinful contentedness and convince ourselves that there is no need for us to look beyond our own "dear community."

In other instances, we unnecessarily depart from them in matters not affected by our union: liturgy, discipline, spirituality, theology, exterior appearances, etc. This is the way in which some Eastern Catholics like to express the difference between them and their brethren of the same rite. They forget that by doing this they lose their usefulness to the Church because for the West they are no longer Easterners and for the East they do not represent the West. Those in the Catholic Church who are determined to Latinize our institutions should understand that by bringing us so close to Latinism they do not increase appreciably the number of Latin adherents but they do lose for the Catholic Church the few Eastern members it has at the present time. The Church can have no special interest for us unless we remain both deeply Catholic and deeply Oriental. The "Latinizers" work, unwittingly perhaps, but certainly against the advantages of the Catholic Church. They set out to prove, indeed, that a sincere connection between these two qualities is impossible within Roman Catholicism.

Another obstacle to our ecumenic mission is our numerical inferiority. We are a minority almost everywhere, which not only makes massive action impossible for us but also gives rise in us to complexes and psychoses characteristic of minority groups.

We should add that the numerical inferiority is often accompanied by a certain spiritual poverty. We have lost our Oriental spirituality while acquiring only imperfectly the spirituality of the West. Assuredly, the union has been in general a cause of enrichment that was not at the same time a revival of all the spiritual values proper to the East, with the exception of the liturgical rites.

A last obstacle hindering considerably the work of unification has been a spirit of exaggerated proselytism displayed by some Catholics. In itself proselytism is an act of virtue, for it is defined as "zeal for making proselytes; that is, converts to a religious faith." We do not speak here of this legitimate and discrete proselytism but of its abuse, of that excess which we may call "conversion mania," not being able to work toward the union of churches or even knowing how to go about it (we must admit that the whole idea with its present methods is comparatively new to the faithful). Some Eastern Catholics, following in this the majority of Latin missionaries, arrived at a point where they could see the work of unification in no other light than in the form of "individual conversion."

Pending the achievement of an ecumenic and definitive union of the churches, it is completely normal that certain souls, convinced of the truth, should request admittance to the Catholic Church in one form or another. Under pain of violating the freedom of conscience, we must accept the souls who come to us. Our Orthodox brethren do the same, which is normal. In our own Patriarchate, the practice prevailing for several decades now has been the following. When groups, even small groups, ask us for admittance, we welcome them only after a long waiting period, sometimes extending to several years, and only after referring these groups repeatedly to the Orthodox authorities. Only after all negotiations prove fruitless and these groups are in danger of being absorbed by certain sects offering them attractive material advantages do we finally decide to admit them. It must be granted that this new method is not adopted always and everywhere. We should never attempt, under the pretext that the union is humanly impossible to achieve, or is far removed in the future, to ravish by all available means from the Orthodox a few particularly weak and defenseless souls or take advantage of internal discords existing among the ranks of the same Orthodoxy in order to undermine it. Precisely because the West has at time looked upon the Eastern Catholics as "tools of conversion," the latter have lost in the eyes of their Orthodox brethren some of the prestige indispensable for the accomplishment of their essential mission which is to work at bringing West and East close together in view of an eventual union to take place in the manner and at the time it will please the Lord to set.

Fortunately, opposed to those elements hindering our mission there are others working in our favor as so many valuable, unique assets we have in our hands.

First of all, is not the greatest source of strength in the work of unification is the acute awareness we have of the great misfortune the present separation means? In countries with an overwhelmingly Catholic majority, such as Italy or Spain, the separation of Christians is a distant evil; an "evil of reason," so to speak, having no serious consequences in public life. Consequently, Catholics in these countries are often tempted to yield to a spirit of passivity and self-sufficiency. More than one responsible Catholic in the West must have secretly thought at one time or another that there are enough Catholics as it is, and that a union with the Orthodox Easterners would be practically more troublesome than advantageous. As for ourselves, we could never reason in this manner. We suffer in our minds, in our hearts, in our very flesh, because of the separation of Christians. We are filled with the desire Christ expressed at the Last Supper: "That they may be one." The schisms divide the members of the same family, hinder any deep-going action on our part upon our social environment, and expose our Christians to the ridicule of their Moslem compatriots. The problem of union haunts us constantly. It is for us a consuming thirst--it is part of our very existence.

For the work of unification we have certain unique advantages. We are of the same race, language, mentality and even liturgy as our Orthodox brethren. We are brethren in the full sense of the word. Union could only be a family reconciliation for us, not a humiliating submission or an avowal of guilt. In suggesting this union, we seek no personal advantage. On the contrary, we further our own disappearance as a hierarchized community. To be exact, we are hoping that once the union is achieved, there will no longer be a united or uniate Eastern Church but simply an Eastern Church, among whose ranks we ourselves shall reenter as if we had never departed.

Another element working in our favor is our faithfulness to the East, a faithfulness finally recovered and vigorously defended. There was a time when some Eastern Catholics thought it was an honor to be able to come as close as possible to to the West and to copy its particular features in the smallest detail. In other words, become Latinized. Admittedly, our Greek Melkite Catholic Church has been the one resisting the most strongly the Latinizing tendencies that have disfigured other Eastern Catholic communities. We have spoken above the willingness of the Catholic West to spare only the liturgical rites of a united East. In fact, in a certain official style of writing, "Eastern Rites" are synonymous with "Eastern Churches." As the Roman Church endeavored to save the "Eastern Rites," so some of its representatives were determined to deprive the Oriental Churches of their own heritage, canonical institutions, and traditional organization and give them a Latin feature.

To quote only one example, the recent code of Eastern canon law, we must unfortunately state that despite an impressive critical apparatus and a terminology inspired by Eastern sources, despite also a great amount of labor worthy of praise, the very core of the new law remains extremely Latinizing in tendency. This has not always been the fault of the specialists doing the work but rather of the environment in which the work was done. For this environment, the closest possible similarity in substance and form with the Latin canon law remains the supreme ideal. Institutions proper to the East, such as the Patriarchate, are tolerated as exceptions and confined within the strictest possible limits when they are not altogether cleverly deprived of every meaning and practically neutralized as a result of an excessive administrative centralization.

The efforts our Church is making to insure that the East is given back its proper features are well known. Our faithfulness to the East must not be interpreted as a tendency to archaism, a blind clinging to ancestral traditions, a sign of certain reservations about the faith, a narrow-mindedness neglecting the essential for the sake of the secondary, a new form of gallicism, or an unlawful desire for independence within the Catholic fold. We are attached to the East because we love what is true and good. We are attached to it because we desire to safeguard the truly apostolic physiognomy of the Church with all the treasures and beauty this means and all the generosity of organizational concepts that render the Church capable of assimilating all nations without taking away from them the qualities that fundamentally characterize them as nations.

Maintaining the Eastern Catholic Church is not a trap we set for the Orthodox. They do not represent a transitory stage before final and total Latinization, nor a temporary concession to the atavistic forces working in Oriental souls. The Eastern Churches must be willed for their own sake in the framework wherein God and nature have placed them for their normal development. In Catholicism, the area of faith is untouchable, immovable, and uniform in its essential lines. But in the details of Christian life as a social phenomenon, many combinations are possible and desirable.

We must be convinced that Christianity can never accomplish its mission in the world unless it is catholic; that is, universal, not only in principle but also in actual fact. If one cannot be Catholic unless he gives up his own liturgy, hierarchy, patristic traditions, history, hymnography, art, language, culture and spiritual heritage, and adopts the rites, philosophical and theological thought, religious poetry, liturgical language, culture, and spirituality of a particular group, be it the best, then the Church is not a great gift of God to the whole world but a faction, however numerous, and a human institution subservient to the interests of one group. Such a church could not be the true Church of Christ. In resisting, then, the Latinization of our institutions, we are not defending any petty parochial interests or an out-dated traditionalism; rather, we are aware of defending the vital interests of the apostolic Church, of remaining faithful to our mission, our vocation which we could not betray without betraying ourselves and disfiguring the message of Christ before our brethren.

We have, therefore, a two-fold mission to accomplish within the Catholic Church. We must fight to insure that Latinism and Catholicism are no longer synonymous, that Catholicism remains open to every culture, every spirit, and every form of organization compatible with the unity of faith and of love. At the same time, by our example, we must force the Orthodox Church to recognize that a union with the Great Church of the West, with the See of Peter, can be achieved without their being compelled to give up Orthodoxy or any of the spiritual treasures of the apostolic and patristic East which is open toward the future no less than toward the past.

If we remain faithful to this mission, we shall arrive at shaping and finding the kind of union that is acceptable to the East as well as the West, a union that is neither pure autocephaly nor an absorption, in principle or in actual fact, but a sharing of the same faith, same sacraments, and same organic hierarchy, in a spirit of sincere respect for the spiritual heritage and organization proper to each Church, under the vigilance, both paternal and fraternal, of the successors of the One to Whom it was said: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church."