Thursday, May 27, 2021

Melkites, Ukrainians, Vatican II, Oh My!

I posted the promotional flyer to this a few weeks back. Here is the video of the event itself.

Posted by Byzantine, TX

11 comments:

  1. NE7May 28, 2021 at 12:42 PM

    IMO, it was actually Pope Leo XIII that enabled the East the most. But he's skirted to the side. Without his Orientalium Dignitatis, we would not have had the recovery of the Eastern traditions made by Met. Sheptytsky and Cardinal Slipyj. They had nothing of Vatican II in mind which essentially thwarted the Uniates and led to this desire among the West and East to adapt Crypto-Orthodoxy essentially.

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  2. Samn!May 28, 2021 at 3:35 PM

    And there would not have been an Orientalium Dignitatis had there not been a large-scale movement to return to Orthodoxy among the Melkite Catholics in the mid-19th century...

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    1. NE7May 28, 2021 at 3:38 PM

      Interesting. Yes, the tradition of the East and West are both critical to the universality of the Church. The Pope clearly saw this.

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    2. Samn!May 28, 2021 at 5:07 PM

      I think it was more of a calculated political move than anything particularly visionary. The Melkites Catholics were made canonically subordinate to Latin hierarchs in the Middle East in 1837 and the Gregorian Calender was imposed on them shortly after that. Following this, the Melkites split into two groups of roughly equal size, one favoring reuniting with Orthodoxy, the other preferring Rome. The Diocese of Amid/Diyarbakr became Orthodox en masse, while the other pro-Orthodox Melkites negotiated with the Russians to try to find a way to become Orthodox without being under Greek bishops (whether as their own church or as part of the Church of Russia), which was obviously a no-go. So in the end, there was a steady trickle back to Orthodoxy of families and a few prominent clergymen, like Archimandrite Gabriel Jibara, but no corporate return, over the course of the 19th century.

      The even more immediate context for Orientalium Dignitas' promulgation in 1892, though, was the British takeover of Egypt and the foundation of the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society (which achieved a much more systematic promotion of Orthodoxy than Russia had been capable of earlier in the century)- with French Catholic power in the Middle East waning significantly relative to Britian and Russia over the following decade, any continuation of Rome's earlier policies would have meant an end of the Uniate project in the region.

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    3. NickMay 30, 2021 at 12:32 PM

      Samn!
      Could you please give me some more detail about the Melkite Catholics being canonically subordinated to Latins in the Middle East in 1837? I have never heard of this...are you sure this took place? What about the Melkite bishops already in the Middle East?...was this all approved by Rome? Please share all you can with me about this...is there a site which gives the history of this?
      God bless!

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  3. Samn!May 31, 2021 at 5:07 AM

    Here's a scholarly discussion of the events I mentioned, from an article that just came out open-access: https://brill.com/view/journals/scri/aop/article-10.1163-18177565-BJA10038/article-10.1163-18177565-BJA10038.xml

    It mentions the 1837 decision, but I don't have the book by Hajjar that it cites at hand. It may be a mis-dating for the Papal brief reacting to the Council of Qarqafeh, Melchitarum Catholicorum Synodus, issued in 1835, which forbade the Melkites from basically doing anything on their own without authorization from either Rome or the Latin missionaries. The Melkite Catholic Patriarchate of Antioch didn't attempt to have a bishop in Palestine until the late 1830s, and it's my understanding that there the Melkite vicar there was in practice under the Latin patriarch until into the 20th century.



    Two other articles, unfortunately not open-access, dealing with this dynamic in the 19th century can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20581831.2021.1881716

    And here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20581831.2021.1881715

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  4. Samn!May 31, 2021 at 5:20 AM

    Another event around that time was the Propaganda Fide's decision in 1837 to de jure allow (and de facto encourage, because there were material inducements) Catholic converts in Nazareth to en masse become Latin rather than Melkite Catholic.

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    1. NickMay 31, 2021 at 10:41 AM

      Seems pretty damning to the idea of unia.

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    2. Samn!May 31, 2021 at 1:22 PM

      Well, the Melkite Unia was born from Euthymius Sayfi, the bishop of Sidon who, under missionary influence, wanted to completely Tridentinize the liturgy (albeit, at least as a first step, in Arabic). Later Melkite Catholic leaders in the 19th century, starting with Germanus Adam, took a more independent view, but this was due to Gallican and Jansenist influences rather than closeness to Orthodoxy. But Rome had a firm policy of gradual but total Latinization until the prospect of losing it all forced Leo XIII's hand.

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    3. NickJune 1, 2021 at 1:12 PM

      So are you saying that Rome placed the Melkite bishops of the Middle East under the jurisdiction of the Latin bishops until Leo XIII?

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  5. Samn!June 1, 2021 at 4:06 PM

    In Palestine and Egypt, yes. In Syria, there was not a developed local Latin hierarchy, but the Melkite Church wasn't allowed to hold synods of its own initiative and obviously whoever was sent from Rome to decide about a given issue took precedence over the patriarch or synod (which is actually still the case today, it's just dressed up in different canonical language- look at the case of Rome recently deposing the Melkite Catholic bishop of Tyre AND appointing its new locum tenens over the heads of the Melkite hierarchy).

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