EASTERN LAWS AND CUSTOMS

Like Christians everywhere Eastern Christians, of whatever rite, have their own particular laws and customs by which they live out their faith within the communities in which they're found. As elsewhere in the Catholic Church, attendance at worship on Sundays and holydays, the observance of fast days, the reception of the Sacraments at Easter time - these distinguish both Catholics of East and West, and the Orthodox, alike.

Our calendar of feasts and fasts is significantly different from that with which Westerners are familiar. There are, of course, many feasts which are common to both West and East - Christmas, Epiphany, Pentecost, the Assumption (Dormition) among them. Some saints' days are also solemnized synchronously in East and West. The Feast of St. John the Baptist (24 June), and SS. Peter & Paul (29 June) are the same in both East and West - largely because of the antiquity of the feasts themselves, combined with the importance of the saints themselves to the Church Universal.

In the Eastern Church we also celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas (the patron of my rite) on 6 December, the Feast of St. George the Martyr (23 April), the Feast of the Protection of Our Lady (1 October) - a *very* important feast in the East, long forgotten in the West because of the general Western ignorance of the history of the Eastern Church - the Annunciation (the Feast of the Incarnation - 25 March), and the Presentation of Our Lady (21 November) and her Nativity (8 September) are also observed by both West and East alike.

I'm mystified at times by what passes for "church history" in this country. For the most part, it is the history of the Western Church, with a passing nod at supremely important moments in its history when it touches for one reason or another on the generally wider history of the Church, even while it was still undivided. E.g., there is little history of the Church which recounts events of the Eastern Empire between the Fall of Rome (420 A.D.) and the Great Schism of the 11th Century - apart from the passing mention of the Patriarch Photius and the Photian Schisms, and the Iconoclastic heresies. But events of the East literally *determined* the events in the West, from the rise and establishment of the Carolingian Empire to and including the establishment of the Papal States. Just why there is this tendency to exclude anything not directly in the patrilineal line of Western history tends to be excluded, whether it is the history of the Church of the history of the world. Just think back for a bit on what you were given as "World History." A little bit of pre-history, some chapters on the Ancient Sumerians and a few more chapters on the old Egyptians, some considerable data on the Levantine area of Palestine/Syria and the Jewish states, a quick jump to some ancient Greek history, then another leap to Roman history, and from there to the present the remainder is, with some minor exceptions, the story of the West - with little or nothing else given on China, India, Africa, the Americas or anything else around the world - almost as though it was Western Europe and its children which were all-important and the rest of the world's history a large and well-developed footnote. I hope some of the messages posted to this conference help to eliminate some of that lacuna in Western knowledge of the world and its goings-on.

Fasting took a rather different tack in the West than it did in the East. In the West, fasting took the general form of reducing the amount of food intake, rather than limiting the kinds of food. Probably as a result of the general economy of the West, which was rather backward for the time, and the general diet as a consequence tended to be bland and the same from day to day. For the vast majority of Westerners, meat was a seldom-seen thing. Even fish was a relative rarity. The East, *far* richer, took the opposite tack. It reduced the intake of the favorite *kinds* of foods - something which is referred to as 'abstinence' in the West, but which constitutes 'fasting' in the East. Actually, the term 'fasting' in Eastern parlance is closer in meaning to the Western expression "fasting and abstinence" than it is to "abstinence" alone.

The West generally practiced, in the early days of the Church, two full meals a day. During the fast days, those were reduced to one full meal a day, with a lighter meal in the morning and at midday. Roman Catholics today still observe abstinence from meat and foods with meat products on the Fridays of Lent, and on Ash Wednesday (though they are *still* bound to observe Friday abstinence from meat if they have not substituted 'some other pious work', in the words of the legislation permitting the use of meats on Fridays. An item few Romans pay heed to, if they've even heard of it, though I find it curious they've NOT heard of it, even from the pulpit....) Eastern Christians observe a *Strict* Fast on the first Monday of Lent (Lent does NOT begin on Ash Wednesday for Easterners...it begins on the Monday), and on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. "Strict Fast," ("Storohyj post'" in Slavonic) prohibits the use of *any* foods that come from animals or contain animal products. Ruled out are eggs,milk, cheese, butter, and flesh meat itself. Still, the cooks of the Eastern Empire showed their skill despite the restrictions by preparing quite savory dishes.

Byzantine Christians of the Near East like the Catholic Melkites observe fasting, even to this day, by abstaining from ALL food from midnight until midday. Reminiscent of the old Roman practice of abstaining from all food, including water, from midnight until the reception of Holy Communion the following day.

But perhaps the most striking difference to Westerners, (not quite so striking for us of the East) is the custom of a married clergy in the Eastern Church. You've often heard the old expression that the Church ought to "let priests marry." An inaccurate phrasing, I'm afraid, and one that leads by its very innocence to many misapprehensions. The Church has *never* made it a general practice to permit priests to marry. Not even in the Eastern Church. Only by way of special dispensation - and under the condition that the recipient of the favor cease his exercise of the priestly ministry - has the Church permitted an ordained man to marry. What HAS been the tradition of the Church, right from the beginning, has been TO ORDAIN MARRIED MEN TO THE PRIESTHOOD. Quite a different thing from "letting priests marry." Married men of the Eastern Rites, all of them, are ordained everywhere in the world - except the United States and Canada, quite licitly and validly.

Bishops, however, must be celibate - i.e., either never married, or currently widowers. That's why bishops are so often chosen from among the ranks of the monastic community. The celibate ideal is really a monastic one, not a priestly one. And that by itself explains why celibacy itself was not instituted universally in the West until the ascendancy of Gregory VII, Hildebrand - former abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, probably the most influential abbey in the history of the Church.

If a married priest's wife dies, he may not marry again. And the choice - either to marry or not to marry - must be made before his ordination to the deaconate.

In the early days of the Church the apostles even ordained married men to the episcopate itself. St. Paul, for example, in his letter to Timothy, whom he'd appointed Bishop of Ephesus, is instructed in the qualities to seek when looking for a man whom he wants to ordain a bishop. Among the other qualifications is this one: "It behooves, therefore, a bishop to be blameless, the husband of one wife only." Obviously, he must be man who has not been married more than once, even though legitimately so. The point here is that Paul evidently sanctioned the consecration of married men as bishops.

That the apostles should do so is understandable when one realizes that in choosing one of their new converts in a town to head up the new Christian community there would not normally be chosen an unmarried young man - and people tended to marry very young then, in comparison to our own day - but a man of mature years, prudent, of good reputation and ability. Men like this would not often be single. Most such would have been men who'd been married for years and fathered families.

The *ideal* of celibacy was *always* cherished in the Church - even in the Christian East, although the apostles themselves, except for Paul himself, and St. John, were probably married. It is a certainty that Peter had been, for we are told in the Scriptures that his mother-in-law was the subject of a miracle performed by Our Lord. One only gets a mother-in-law along with a wife.

Paul says that celibacy is the *better* thing for someone who wishes to devote him/herself to the service of God because if a man has a wife (or a wife a husband) he/she must be occupied to some extent, at least, in providing for the spouse and pleasing them, instead of being *wholly* intend on pleasing God, as would be needful if all things were to be perfect. (1 Corinthians 7:32)

This is then how we find the early Church: both celibate and married clergy existed lawfully. In the Western Church, celibacy gradually became the law, becoming the norm in the 12th Century. In the East, celibacy became the law, but only for bishops,not for priests, who could choose either marriage *or* celibacy. Monks, of course, are *always* celibate, in both the East and the West. And these laws have remained in force to the present day.

Since 1929, through a ruling of the Holy See titled "Cum Data Fuerit," no more candidates for the priesthood may opt for marriage among the Eastern Catholics of either the United States or Canada. The older married priests (for two of whom I was an assistant pastor in my youth), of course, are still in good standing, and after the Second World War, many married Catholic priests accompanied their laity as refugees from Communist Eastern Europe, and as displaced persons under the UNRRA resettlement programs of the late 40s and early 50s. These, too, are in good standing, and many of them are still serving as pastors in their parishes both in Canada and here.

The question of introducing an optional celibacy among Roman Catholic priests is the subject of frequent debate nowadays. Some Catholics are vehemently opposed to the idea of a married clergy, insisting that the celibate ones are more 'ascetical', though I think there are good grounds for doubting this. Eastern Christians counter by saying that their married priests are more fatherly. It's kind of amusing that the same people who say they wouldn't like to confide in a married priest find no trouble at all in telling *very* secret things to their married doctors and attorneys.