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Western Rite Criticism

734 bytes added, 18:08, February 16, 2009
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Lack of liturgical continuity: Thanks, Willibrord, for your suggestion!
Finally, more historically minded criticisms of the Western Rite usually center around the idea that it is untenable to try to revive a liturgical tradition which was lost centuries ago when the West fell away from the [[Orthodox Church]]. This argument essentially states that, because the Western Rite died out in the Church, and because a continuous living tradition is a necessary element of liturgical practice, the Western Rite ought to be abandoned and only developments from the Byzantine Rite ought to be pursued.
In contrast to this claim, others note that it is not a dogmatic principle of the Church that liturgical traditions can neither be revived nor created. After all, there are whole services even within the Byzantine Rite which are not universally practiced (e.g., the [[molieben]]), so they must have been invented somewhere along the way rather than being part of the [[typikon]] when it first came into the form we now know it. Even then, the rites being used by Western Rite Orthodox Christians are not new, but mainly predate the [[Great Schism]].
Another response to such criticisms is that the the vast majority of the rites being used by Western Rite Orthodox Christians are not new, but mainly predate the [[Great Schism]]. The ordinary of the [[Liturgy of St. Gregory]], for example, predates the schism. (Many devotions developed after the schism with which critics take issue are in fact paraliturgical.) Further, a number of the pre-schism texts (not simply the ordinary but the propers) have been fully restored and translated, such as the [[Sarum Rite]], a local use of the [[Roman rite]] from the pre-schismatic period. Translations of the Sarum rite are currently utilized in [[ROCOR]] as well as the [[Old Calendarists|Old Calendarist]] [[Holy Synod of Milan|Milan Synod]]. As well, the Ambrosian rite has been used on occasion by the [[Church of Russia|Moscow Patriarchate]].  Bishop [[Jerome (Shaw) of Manhattan]] (ROCOR) also argues the little-known Liturgy of St. Peter, a [[liturgy]] outwardly identical to that of the Byzantine rite with the ancient Gregorian canon in its place, never fell out of use within Orthodoxy. The Old Believers and others celebrated this, explicitly endorsing the validity of the Western canon. At present, the historicity of this assertion is not universally accepted.
Further, the now fairly well-known [[Liturgy of St. James]] once fell out of use throughout most of the Church and has now been revived in many places to be celebrated on [[October 23]].
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