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A Brief Perspective on the Modes of Baptisms

The liturgical-sacramental experience of baptism is understood amongst a great deal of Christian denominations[1] to be a transformative experience of salvific reality, necessary for the Christian participant. Containing within itself a nearly universal recognition of importance amongst Christians, the liturgical form of baptism is often debated as to how one should receive this sacrament: weather by sprinkling, pouring, or immersion of water.

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A Reasonable Philosophy for the Western Rite

“Congregations and parishes, or larger administrative units, may be received…and be permitted to retain and use all such Western liturgical rites, devotional practices and customs that are not contrary to the Orthodox faith and are logically derived from a Western usage antedating the Papal schism of the eleventh century.” This is from the 1958 Western Rite edict of Metropolitan Antony of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America. Continue reading “A Reasonable Philosophy for the Western Rite”

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Bishop Basil Comments on the Western Rite

My observations begin with my own experience with Western Rite. Some of you who have known me since I’ve been consecrated have heard this confession before. Before I was thoroughly exposed to the Western Rite by attending services, I was very leery. I knew that philosophically and historically it was legitimate. But I couldn’t believe that it could be authentic. And that was because I hadn’t experienced it. So the confession is that you have a convert here.

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Orthodox and Catholics in the Seventeenth Century: Schism or Intercommunion?

EVENT OR PROCESS?

For use on the first Sunday in Lent, the service books of the Greek Orthodox Church include a special office known as ‘The Synodikon of Orthodoxy’, which contains no less than sixty anathemas against different heresies and heresiarchs.1 Yet in this comprehensive denunciation there is one unexpected omission: no reference is made to the errors of the Latins, no allusion to the Filioque or the papal claims, even though more than a third of the anathemas date from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, a time when doctrinal disagreements between East and West had emerged clearly into the open.

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What Do We Make of the Western Rite?

When I first stepped into a Western Rite parish, I nearly walked out in the middle of the service. “What is this?” “It is so western!” “This can’t be Orthodox…” These were the thoughts that filled my mind as I watched the community chant in Gregorian tones and genuflect in front of the altar. I had been chrismated into the Church several years and had only experienced Orthodoxy in its eastern expression. Though I had heard a few references to “Western-Riters,” it was rarely in a positive light. Essentially, the thought of anything western struck me as a bad idea, and like so many people, I never took the time to examine these assumptions in the light of our Church’s history and theology.

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Indulgences

I cannot attempt here to investigate the entire Roman Catholic doctrine of Indulgences. I only wish to comment briefly on the doctrine as it affects the practice of devotions. It does, indeed have an effect because the trend since the 17th or 18th centuries has been to grant indulgences mostly for performing devotions. Therefore, the practice of devotions has become linked in the popular mind with the gaining of indulgences.

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