I hope you all had a blessed celebration of the Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday) last week. It was such a joy for me to celebrate together with our whole St. John Vianney community my own family’s tenth Divine Mercy potluck here on Vashon. Let us always praise our “God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the paschal feast kindle the faith of the people…made [his] own” and pray earnestly that each of us “grasp and rightly understand in what font [we] have been washed, by whose Spirit [we] have been reborn, by whose Blood [we] have been redeemed” (Collect for the Second Sunday of Easter). I wasn’t able to prepare an entry for last week as I was enjoying my Spring Break part of which my family spent taking in the beauty of the Washington coast and camping there. Many of the suggestions I offered in the Easter Sunday column remain timely throughout this whole Eastertide of the Resurrection of our Lord including books to read (for various ages) and several devotions through which we can enter into the Resurrection.
This week in the sacred liturgy we continue on each of the days in the Mass readings to move through the first eight chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, the beginning of the early Church in Jerusalem, including the martyrdom of St. Stephen our first Christian martyr (protomartyr) and among the first seven deacons (see Acts 6:1-7). See the suggested Bible Project overview of Acts that I recommended in the Easter Sunday installment.
In the Gospel readings for this week we hear the Bread of Life discourse from Gospel of John (chapter 6) reminding us that this Eastertide is mystagogical (an unpacking of the mysteries, the sacraments) not only for those initiated at the great Easter Vigil but also for those of us who that night or Easter Sunday morning renewed our own baptismal promises. Savoring John 6 throughout this week is thus the Church’s invitation to renew our understanding of and commitment to encountering the Risen Christ in the Eucharist.
As we continue our story of the Church in the Acts of the Apostles which we hear as our First Reading at every Mass during Eastertide we see the early Christian community take shape and go out to all the ends of the earth as Jesus commanded them. In so doing the apostles and their companions are translating the Good News of the Resurrection into the languages and cultures of each people whom they encountered. This experience led to diverse Christian expressions while maintaining a shared set of beliefs grounded in that shared encounter with the Risen Jesus Christ. When I was in graduate school I was drawn to the study of two very distinct expressions of Catholic Christianity. While a student at Notre Dame and then in San Diego I spent a great deal of time studying and praying with the Chaldean Catholic community. Chaldeans are the Catholic Christians native to northern Iraq/Assyria, centered around Mosul, which has been Christian for almost 2000 years! When it came time for me to undertake fieldwork abroad, I was unable to go to northern Iraq in the early 2000s and so I took the research questions I had about the development of an authentic, apostolic Christianity not rooted in Western philosophical influences and literally went a different direction. I switched to studying Tigrinya, the Semitic language of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea and studied the Eritrean Catholic (Ge’ez Rite) Catholic Church. I was able to study in Asmara and learned a great deal about the liturgy, spirituality, and lived experience of Eritrean Catholics. Both of these beautiful and distinct rites of the Catholic Church helped me to better understand my own Roman Catholic rite more fully just like learning a foreign language enables you to better understand the grammar of your mother tongue.
Last week at the conclusion of Mass Fr. David Mayovsky not only shared the pastoral assignments for our Partners in the Gospel but he also shared his current formation to have bi-ritual faculties, that is to say, to be able to continue to celebrate the Mass of the Roman Rite (as we know) as our pastor as well as to soon celebrate the Byzantine Divine Liturgy (Eastern Catholic name for what we call Mass). In the coming weeks I know Fr. David will be sharing more about his journey that has led to his seeking such bi-ritual competency and faculties. And, just as my study of the Chaldean Catholic and Eritrean Catholic churches helped me deepen my knowledge of the Roman Rite I hope you too will see Fr. David’s journey as an occasion for you to know Christ ever more richly through the diversity of liturgical rites in that one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church in which we profess believe every Sunday. I would highly encourage you to check out this overview of the various churches that all make up the Catholic Church: https://youtu.be/U84znOpESv8 This will be good background to some formation I will also be offering here and experiences Fr. David will be sharing with us.
We see in the early history of Christianity that, after the Christians moved out from Jerusalem (as we hear in the Acts of the Apostles), Antioch in Syria becomes the first place where the followers of Jesus would be called Christians. Through the missionary efforts of St. Paul Christianity spread throughout the Hellenistic (or Greek-speaking) world and together with St. Peter, even to Rome, the capital of the empire. Very early on Christians also established themselves in the cultural hub of the eastern Mediterranean, Alexandria in Egypt, where a sizeable Jewish diaspora had been for centuries. In each of these three sees—Antioch, Rome, and Alexandria—a distinct way of being Christian emerged. After Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire in the early fourth century and with the transfer of the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople) the new capital became the central see for Greek speaking Christians. Meanwhile the Syriac community of Antioch found itself split by the ever changing boundary between the Persian and Roman Empires. Thus by the time we reach the fifth century there are four families. Each had its own language, shape of liturgy, and spiritual ancestors. The Roman Rite, centered in Rome and covering the Western part of the empire, used Latin and relied on the likes of St. Irenaeus (from France) and St. Augustine (from North Africa). The Byzantine Rite, centered on Constantinople and covering Greece and Turkey, used Greek and looked to St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great. The Alexandrian or Coptic rite in Egypt and points south used Coptic (a successor language to ancient Egyptian) in the liturgy and relied on St. Athanasius and desert monastic spiritual fathers. The Antiochian rites—one Eastern Syriac branch in Mesopotamia in the Persian Empire and beyond to India and Central Asia used Aramaic in the liturgy and relied on the likes of St. Ephrem the Syrian while the other Western Syriac branch was rooted in Lebanon and other parts of the Levant in the Roman Empire, such as Jerusalem. While all this detail may seem overwhelming it helps us see how the Church has always been universal, catholic, from the beginning, adapting to the cultures and languages where the Good News was preached. In future installments I’ll look at how these families grew, influenced one another, maintained communion in diversity, and hopefully provide some additional context for the multicultural, multi-ritual Catholic Church of whom we’re so blessed to be members.
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