The Catholic East Congregation For The Eastern Churches

This volume is a presentation, published in the mid-1930s of "the history, religious life, and present state of the Eastern [Catholic] church". The Eastern Catholic Churches are autonomous, self-governing, and in full communion with the Pope. Together with the Latin Church, they compose the worldwide Catholic Church. They preserve some centuries-old eastern liturgical, devotional and theological traditions, shared in most cases with the various other Eastern Christian churches with which they were once associated. Historically, Eastern Catholic Churches were located in Eastern Europe, the Asian Middle East, Northern Africa and India. The terms Oriental Catholic and Eastern Catholic include these, but are broader, since they also cover Catholics who follow the Alexandrian, Antiochian, Armenian and Chaldean liturgical traditions.

Examines the long and often difficult history of the Eastern-Church Catholics (e.g., Melkites, Maronites, Ruthenians, Copts, Ukrainians) and their relationship, often tenuous, with Rome.

In recent years a new interest in the Eastern Churches has emerged in the Western Churches both Catholic and Protestant. The reader of this work will find answers to such fundamental questions as Who are Eastern Catholics?" "How did the Eastern Catholic Churches originate?" "Who are Orthodox Christians?" "How do Orthodox Christians differ from Eastern Catholics?" "Why do so many diverse Eastern Churches exist?" While it cannot answer all these questions thoroughly, this concise booklet can help interested laity, theological students, and ministers come to understand and respect Eastern Catholicism for its many contributions to the universal Catholic Church.

In the second edition of this major work, Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols provides a systematic account of the origins, development and recent history—now updated—of the relations between Rome and all separated Eastern Christians. By the end of the twentieth century, events in Eastern Europe, notably the conflict between the Orthodox and Uniate Churches in the Ukraine and Rumania, the tension between Rome and the Moscow patriarchate over the re-establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in the Russian Federation, and the civil war in the then federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, brought attention to the fragile relations between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which once had been two parts of a single Communion. At the start of the twenty-first century, in the pontificate of Benedict XVI, a papal visit to Russia—at the symbolic level, a major step forward in the ‘healing of memories’— appears at last a realistic hope. In addition, the schisms separating Rome from the two lesser, but no less interesting, Christian families, the Assyrian (Nestorian) and Oriental Orthodox (Monophysite) Churches, are examined. The book also contains an account of the origins and present condition of the Eastern Catholic Churches—a deeper knowledge of which, by their Western brethren, was called for at the Second Vatican Council as well as by subsequent synods and popes. Providing both historical and theological explanations of these divisions, this illuminating and thought-provoking book chronicles the recent steps taken to mend them in the Ecumenical Movement and offers a realistic assessment of the difficulties (theological and political) which any reunion would experience.

"This book is a reprint of a series of articles that first appeared in Liturgical arts in 1935"--Page x."First edition." "List of books, periodicals and pamphlets introductory to a study of the Eastern rites": pages 95-110. The Eastern branches of the tree of life, by F.J. McGarrigle.--A new branch of the tree of life: the Syro-Malankara church, by Mar Ivanios.--The Ethiopic church, by Eug©·ne cardinal Tisserant.--The code of canon law and the Catholics of Eastern rites, by J.M. O'Hara.--Liturgy and asceticism in the Eastern church, by John La Farge.--The spiritual and aesthetic value of icons, by Ildefonse Dirks.