Page:Uniate Eastern Churches.pdf/53

Rh Such considerations as these will account amply for whatever friction there has been in the past, friction that will cease with a better appreciation of their ideas and attitude (for in as far as the Roman Congregations have ever offended their susceptibilities, it has been from ignorance rather than from malice).

But there is another side to all this. The really wonderful thing about the Uniates is not that occasionally they have grumbled; it is, in spite of that, in spite of blunders made by the West towards them, their magnificent loyalty to the Catholic ideal. It is the right sort of loyalty, to an ideal, not to persons. They have no more personal devotion towards Italian Cardinals and the Monsignori of the Roman congregations than we have in the North. What they care for is the one united Church of Christ throughout the world, and the Holy See as guarding that unity. They see around them the same process of erosion among the schismatics as we see among the Protestants; and they, too, understand that the bond of union among Catholics is our common loyalty to the primate-see. This idea so dominates that, in spite of the occasional friction, the Pope has no more loyal subjects in the world than his brothers and children of Eastern rites. The very fact that they keep and cherish their union with Rome, although the schismatics are never tired of calling them slaves, of boasting of their own liberty, shows how real this ideal must be to the Uniates. It requires some strength of conviction to acknowledge as your chief a bishop of a foreign rite, to submit the rules of your own liturgy to the supervision of men who themselves use another. They draw this strength from their unswerving belief in the Catholic ideal of one universal, united Church of God. It is for the sake of that that they obey a Latin authority, for the sake of that, and because they know that the bishop who holds the succession of Peter rises above all rites and is a foreigner to none of his brethren.

Indeed, from my experience I am inclined to think that the pride of the Uniates in their communion with Rome is sometimes even excessive, that they look with too much scorn on their non-uniate neighbours. Any Latin in the Levant will see with what pride the Uniates he meets remember that they belong to the same body as he does, that they have a right to the same consciousness of citizenship in the great Church as he. They are conscious, too, that they are better educated, more strict in their laws, more edifying in the lives of their clergy than the other Eastern Christians. They feel themselves,