THE
P RTAL
May 2017
Page 6
An important question
Fr Mark Woodruff Chairman of
the Society of St John Chrysostom
“W
hy can’t they just integrate as normal Catholics?” Bemused at the
prospect of Anglicans with their own patrimony, some sensed an exclusive import for those
who thought Catholicism was not good enough as it was. Aidan Nichols, however, pointed out that English
Catholicism has four ingredient traditions – those descending from the undivided pre-Reformation Ecclesia
Anglicana; those who migrated from Ireland; the 19th and 20th century converts; and the diaspora from the
whole world in the 20th and 21st – but what was missing was the lived experience of the 450-year tradition of
liturgical worship in English, and a distinct pastoral-spiritual engagement in life, culture and society to which
Catholicism had never been able to address itself from within. The Ordinariate offers this.
Catholics once anxious about its suspected
abnormality now wonder where the mainstream
Sunday use of Divine Worship as the manifestation
of Church and Gospel in such a classic English voice
is to be found in more than a handful of places. The
writer is a Latin priest serving in a Byzantine Catholic
Church that adds its accent to conveying the Catholic
faith in an environment that is now less attuned to any
form of Christianity.
Imagine if the Syriac Christians who rediscovered
communion with Peter in 1626 had “just integrated as
normal Catholics”. The Crusades bringing the Latins
from the west to the Middle East also led to warm
relations between the Catholic Church and Syriac
Christians who had been condemned for centuries as
Monophysite heretics - “those who say Christ has only
one nature”, rather than one Person in two natures.
Theirs is the Liturgy of St James the Brother of the
Lord (the Holy Qurbana – “Corban”, Mark 7.11 –
consecration, sacrifice), reflecting the worship of early
Christian Jerusalem, shared across the empire’s “West
Syrian” region, by Greek and Syriac alike, the basis for
the Greek Byzantine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom,
too. Theirs is St Ephrem (the great theologian-poet,
306-373 – “Strengthen for service, Lord, the hands that
Holy Things have taken”). From their Liturgy came to
us the acclamation, Hosanna – “Saviour, save us!”
The heartland of their Church is south-east Turkey,
northern Syria and northern Iraq. It has often needed
to be a pilgrim Church. The patriarchate anciently
based in Antioch, moved to a monastery near Aleppo
in Syria in 1034.
The Catholic Syriac patriarch resettled in Lebanon in
the 1780s, then Mardin in 1850 in south-east Turkey,
There had been a vast misunderstanding in until he fled with the people and the Armenians from
translation. The Latin Jesuits and Capuchins found the Ottomans’ genocide in 1915, only to be faced
that Syriac Christians believed the same as Catholics, with massacres by Kurds. Thus in 1924, the Orthodox
yet put it another way: one incarnate Word of God, Syriac patriarch moved to Homs and later Damascus,
one Christ with both full humanity and full divinity, and the Syriac Catholic to Beirut.
not mixed up but inseparable.
The pilgrimage of martyrdom continues. At the heart
They were not forced to abandon their ancient of Syriac theology and spirituality are the monasteries.
Bible, or their venerable liturgy, or their language and Mar Mattai from AD 363 is the great Syriac Orthodox
their saints, to “integrate” as Catholics. Instead their repository of manuscripts, near Mosul, Iraq, a refuge
tradition was honoured as a living source for our own. for Christians attacked by Islamic State. Syriac Catholic
Mar Behnam, no less old, was destroyed in March
Greek had been the language of the cities, like Antioch. 2015, the monks evicted with only their clothes, and
Syriac was the language of the people in the country, the shrine of the martyr Behnam blown up.
from the same language family as Christ’s. Theirs is
the Peshitta, crafted out of the live translations at each
There are 500,000 Syriac Orthodox and 206,000
Eucharist of the Greek Old Testament, the letters of St Syriac Catholics. Scattered to new worlds, they
Paul and the Gospels, recalling how the Lord first spoke are rebuilding their old world too, lest losing their
of the Kingdom, confirming that Matthew 1.23 indeed patrimony we lose our own roots. Thanks be to God
originally said “the virgin shall conceive”, and not “a that their tradition still sustains their witness to Christ
young woman”.
crucified, now risen from the dead.