Page:Uniate Eastern Churches.pdf/74

44 All the old rites of Christendom are still represented within the Catholic Church; there is a Uniate Church corresponding to each schismatical body, and one entirely Uniate Church, that of the Maronites.

The connecting link in each is now, practically, the rite. Originally, and still, in theory, it is their common obedience to their Patriarch. From this obedience follows the common use of his rite. Yet now it is perhaps more according to the circumstances to say that each Church obeys a certain Patriarch because it uses his rite, rather than to say that it uses its rite because it obeys him.

In any case, language makes no difference to rite. Nor does the place where a man may be born or live.

Nothing is more to be denounced than any attitude of superiority on the part of Latins towards their Uniate fellow-Catholics. The Uniates have exactly as much right to their venerable liturgies and customs as we have to ours. They are in no sense a compromise or an accidental adjunct to the Catholic Church. They form integral and important parts of it. They represent the old Catholic Eastern Churches, as they were before later schisms cut off so many of their members. Their position is exactly that of the great Eastern Fathers, Catholic, but not Roman. Indeed, in principle, they are the people who save the situation of a universal Church, for which we too stand.

We have no more right to think less of them than they have to despise us. This has always been most clearly the attitude of the Holy See, best summed up in the immortal words of Benedict XIV: "Eastern Christians should be Catholics; they have no need to become Latins." For our Lord gave his followers most explicit commands that they should belong to the one Catholic Church he founded; he never commanded them all to say their prayers in Latin or to use the Roman rite.