An Eastern Liturgical Rite in Full Communion With Rome

In October 1596 a synod of Ruthenian Orthodox bishops meeting at Brest, in what is now Belarus, accepted union with the see of Rome while asking to keep their own Byzantine rite, their married clergy and their own canon law intact. The bishops' motive was mixed: some genuinely sought reunion with the wider church after the schism of 1054, others hoped communion with Rome would raise their social standing against the Polish Catholic nobility that already outranked them under the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Rome accepted the terms, and the arrangement became the template most later Eastern Catholic unions have followed rather than a one time exception. Not every Ruthenian bishop or parish accepted the union, and those who refused kept the Orthodox communion the synod had left, so Brest split the Ruthenian church into two bodies using the identical rite rather than converting one whole tradition into another. The church that descends from the accepting bishops became, after further nineteenth and twentieth century upheavals under Russian and then Soviet rule, the body now called the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the largest Eastern Catholic church in the world today. Most other Eastern Catholic churches trace their own communion with Rome to a comparable union synod on the Brest model; the Maronite Church is the standing exception, since its own tradition holds it was never separated from Rome at all rather than reunited to it.

Full communion with the see of Rome asks for exactly two things: assent to the Catholic Church's defined dogmas, including the pope's own teaching authority, and inclusion in the structures of church government that flow from that assent. Everything else an outsider might expect to change stays as it was. An Eastern Catholic church keeps its own patriarch or major archbishop, its own canon law, its own liturgical calendar and language, and, outside a few dioceses where local custom has since restricted it, married priests, a discipline the Latin church does not extend to its own clergy. Several Eastern Catholic churches, the Maronite and Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches among them, continue to celebrate their liturgy without adding the Filioque clause to the creed in Greek or Syriac, even though the Latin church that receives them into communion has held that clause since the eleventh century, because the shared faith Rome asks for has never been read as requiring one uniform liturgical text. From the Orthodox side, this arrangement is often read differently: not as proof that rite and faith can separate cleanly, but as an instrument built to draw Orthodox communities toward eventual Latinization one generation at a time, a reading the Eastern Catholic churches themselves reject as a description of their own two lung ecclesiology.