By: adminmyr

adminmyr — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 01:29:54 +0000

Thanks, Irene, for this: I am sometimes guilty of assuming only we Orthodox are Byzantines but of course the Greek Catholics also practise the Byzantine Rite. We all used to be One Church, after all. 🙂 As for the confusing moniker, Greek Catholic, you’ve illuminated it yourself in your note when you distinguish yourself from Roman Catholic. So, there are two types of Catholics we’re talking about here: western (Roman, Latin) and Eastern (Greek, Ukrainian). There’s no confusion in Orthodoxy because it has no western “wing” or “arm.” But I also remember childhood confusion around the name of our church, St John’s Ukrainian Greek Orthodox. We’ve dropped the “Greek” because it was only there, I think, to gesture at our origins in, ahem, Byzantium.

By: Irene Zabytko

Irene Zabytko — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 02:53:14 +0000

Thanks so much, Myrna. A succinct and illuminating definition of this faith many of us share in particular Ukrainians, and yet know little about. I recall in my Ukrainian and Catholic grammar school, we never were told of our Byzantine links. In retrospect, we were ill-instructed by the nuns mostly because there were no proper religious books (in English) for us “Greek Catholics”–a term I still find confusing. But we did have Roman Catholic based books which were interesting, but really had no meaningful relationship to the Liturgy, prayers and other rituals we were practicing as children and at least for me, did nothing to edify or help to appreciate our faith and customs.

Comments on: mini blog: Byzantium – who?

By: adminmyr

By: Irene Zabytko