Eastern Catholics help church be fully 'catholic,' speakers say

ROME (CNS) -- The Eastern Catholic churches are not an "anomaly" or an "ecclesial monstrosity" but are Catholic communities with their own liturgical, theological, spiritual and canonical heritage that help make the church truly catholic, said Maronite Archbishop Michel Jalakh.

"We do not exist to mediate but to participate fully in the life and theology of the universal Catholic Church, bringing our experience and history, our way of thinking and our ecclesial life," said Archbishop Jalakh, secretary of the Dicastery for Eastern Churches.

The archbishop spoke at Rome's Pontifical Oriental Institute March 31 at the presentation of "Eastern Catholic Theology in Action," the first volume in the Eastern Catholic Studies and Texts series published by Catholic University of America Press.

Over the past 50 years, Archbishop Jalakh said, there has been a shift in the way the rest of the Catholic Church views the Eastern Catholic churches: first seeing them as an "obstacle" to full unity, particularly with the Orthodox; then seeing them as an "anomaly"; and finally describing them as a potential "bridge" to Catholic unity with their Orthodox counterparts.

While there is movement toward recognizing them as churches and not simply tools, he said, in the Roman Curia there still is a tendency to hand the Dicastery for Eastern Churches anything that deals with the East "as if to say, 'Take care of this. We understand nothing,' as if the East were an unsolvable puzzle or a labyrinth to avoid."

Father Basilio Petrà, a professor at Rome's Pontifical Alphonsianum Academy, said the change can be seen even in just the last decade. At the synod assemblies on the family in 2014-2015, there was only one Eastern Catholic priest present, and he was a celibate priest when many Eastern churches always had and continue to have a tradition of married priests.

Despite some progress, he said, "the dominant mentality" in the Roman Curia and in the wider Catholic Church continues to identify "Catholic" with "Latin rite."

Rather than recognizing, as many Eastern churches do, that God can call a person to both marriage and priesthood, Father Petrà said, there persists "the idea that the Eastern married priesthood is a sort of concession to human weakness."

The priest called on Eastern Catholic theologians to develop a more thorough theological reflection on married priesthood that could help people understand that it is one vocation and not two competing vocations as many Latin-rite Catholics would see it.

Still, Father Petrà drew attention to the references to the Christian East and the experience of Eastern Catholics found in the final document of the synod on synodality and to the fact that Pope Francis set up a study group on relations between the Latin and Eastern Catholic churches as part of the ongoing synod process.

Father Alexander Laschuk, executive director of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in Toronto, said that in North America the ability of Eastern Catholic bishops to minister to their people is aided by the generosity of their Latin-rite Catholic counterparts.

The synod on synodality's synthesis report in October 2023 said, "There is a need for the local Latin-rite Churches, in the name of synodality, to help the Eastern faithful who have emigrated to preserve their identity and cultivate their specific heritage, without undergoing processes of assimilation."

Father Laschuk, speaking at the book presentation, said statistics for Eastern Catholics in the United States and Canada make clear that assimilation is a reality, and new ways must be found to preserve "the diversity of the church, which contributes to the church's splendor."

Deacon Daniel Galadza, a professor at the Pontifical Oriental Institute and one of the contributors to the book, told the audience that "an interest in eastern Catholic theology -- manifested in its authentic liturgical, spiritual and canonical heritage -- is a refreshing change to an exaggerated interest in church politics or culture that has often characterized it in the past."

Father Andrew Summerson, co-editor of the volume, a professor at the Sheptytsky Institute in Toronto and pastor of St. Mary Byzantine Catholic Church in Whiting, Indiana, said he hoped the book and the ongoing series would allow Eastern Catholic theologians to fulfill their vocation of "praying and living in their natural habitat between the altar and the aula (lecture hall), the stacks of the library and the services."