Comments worth repeating

Sometimes comments are just as readable and informative as the blog posts themselves. Take this post from The Young Fogey in reponse to a posting on the Byzantine Forum.

Just about everybody agrees that the Oriental Orthodox are not really Monophysites after all but estranged Orthodox who don't use the Byzantine Rite. I've been saying for some time echoing Kallistos (Ware) and others that official Oriental Orthodox-Eastern Orthodox reunion is only a matter of time and will happen much sooner than any big East-West reconciliation... because they're both Eastern! It seems that locally with the Antiochians it's happening.

The Middle East seems a case of 'when in Rome'. Melkite and Antiochian families - Christian Arabs surrounded by Muslims - identify as one or the other but intermarry, intercommune and have their kids baptised and chrismated at each other's churches all the time and the clergy know it. Also, the custom is for a wife to join her husband's church, regardless. The clergy are fine with that too and nobody is excommunicated. The only division is the clergy don't concelebrate.

(The sort of thing that makes doxer-than-thou converts in the US have kittens which is rather fun. 'Graceless Western heretics! Papists!', the fulminations of ex-Protestants who've taken their anti-Roman prejudice with them and reinforce it with the most obnoxious, anti-Western, xenophobic Orthodox reading material they can get their hands on. Not the same as a civil, charitable difference of opinion about the origin and scope of the papacy.)

That said, the Orthodox situation in the US is different, rather like the Roman Catholic Church used to be. Unlike the laid-back approach of Italians and Hispanics for example, American RCs were rule-enforcers. 'Rules are made by Rome and enforced in the United States.' (Which is why Europeans were really shocked by the massive rebellion in America after Vatican II!) Anyway in America the Orthodox enforce the rule against intercommunion so to avoid scandal (unlike in the Lebanon and Syria where it's accepted) don't do it!

Some well-meaning high-church Byzantine Catholics, not liberals theologically, seem to adopt a kind of antinomianism about this (ecclesiological liberalism regarding the sacraments) which seems wrong even though one can point to the Middle East as precedent looking at this logically. So essentially I agree with you: no, it's not OK for an isolated Orthodox to commune with the local Byzantine Catholics (or vice versa) unless he intends to formally change churches by so doing. This isn't Damascus or Beirut - that's how it works in the States.

Is the church/parish you wish to commune in itself "in communion" with your bishop? If the answer is "no" then do not do it, unless it is your intention to sever communion with him.

Exactly.