Just a bit closer.

At the end of liturgy with SBG today, the pastor read a prayer intended to be part of the Fortnight for Freedom campaign, but it fits with the rite and was nothing like what I heard at Atonment. Was it composed by the Eparchy of Van Nuys, by someone with a better handle on Christian theology and spirituality (even though it was still rather nationalist in its understanding of the union)? It is better than the other prayer, which seemed to have been done by undiscerning Catholics who had been assimilated into the Yankee mindset. (Using the Pledge of Allegiance as inspiration of the prayer! Incroyable!)

During the liturgy I felt moved to change rites and to join the parish. But I still want to check out SE in SJ sometime. It's been so long since I've been at Holy Transfiguration in VA. If I were to talk about the liturgical experience itself, nothing compares to Holy Transfiguration and St. Michael's, and I'm not saying that because those were among my first experiences of the Byzantine rite. (I also visited a Ukrainian Catholic church in Scranton, St. Vladimir, but the congregation was made up mostly of elderly people and that did make a difference in the worship ethos.)

I was thinking about the liturgical calendar and the cult of saints within a rite. How much variation exists now between various Roman-rite regions with respect to the saints who are honored in the liturgical calendar? Is it possible for greater variation to develop so that the local Churches are more "nationalist"? Or, at the very least, to build up different "uses" of the Roman rite, each with better hieratic vernacular? After all the Western churches are moving away from uniformity to greater diversity with respect to liturgical language. Should everything else remain uniform?

This is not to say that those now presently in the Roman rite should not have some devotion to the same saints; just that some people may (rightly?) have more devotion to a lesser-known saint from their locale or patria than people from a different locale or patria. Honoring the saints of the early Church and the Church of the first millenium, as well as various Latins down the centuries is a part of my heritage. Could Byzantine-rite Catholics living in countries in which the Roman-rite majority dominates, and who have some Roman/Latin heritage, add Roman-rite saints to their calendar or cultus?



The Rite Switch: why Roman rite Catholics become Eastern rite by Regina Doman