Western Rite Orthodoxy

rakovsky · Jun 27, 2016

Christina wrote that she feels both Anglican and Eastern Orthodox, and Philip told me that he found the concept of Western Rite Orthodoxy interesting. So I decided to make a thread here discussing it, in case others are interested in this. One of the questions that arises from this topic is how Western Rite Orthodoxy compares with Anglicanism.

I will begin by listing some main websites below:

The "Orthodox Wikipedia" Encyclopedia gives the following entry on the Western Rite in Orthodoxy:

The Western Rite is a minority liturgical tradition within the Orthodox Church. Western Rite Orthodox Christians hold the full Orthodox faith in common with their brethren of the Byzantine Rite but celebrate Western forms of liturgy. Liturgical diversity, both between and within the East and West, was common before the Great Schism, yet not as diverse as like in today's time.

...
Liturgy in the Antiochian Western Rite Vicariate
North American Western Rite parishes in the Antiochian Western Rite Vicariate generally follow one of two types of traditional Western liturgical traditions (and sometimes both). The majority celebrate the Liturgy of St. Tikhon of Moscow, which is commonly accepted to be an adaptation of the Communion service from the 1928 Anglican Book of Common Prayer and The Anglican Missal in the American Edition.[4] Until 1977, all Western Rite Vicariate parishes celebrated only the Liturgy of St. Gregory the Great, which is a modified form of the Tridentine Mass (that is, the Mass as revised and authorized by the Roman Catholic Council of Trent). Many parishes within the Western Rite Vicariate continue to celebrate the Gregorian liturgy. Since most AWRV parishes celebrate more than one weekly liturgy, many of the parishes that celebrate the Liturgy of St. Tikhon on Sunday celebrate the Liturgy of St. Gregory on weekdays.

The Western Rite liturgy, depending on its type, makes less use of the litanies than the Byzantine Rite. Celebrants wear distinctive Western vestments, and the faithful follow pious devotional customs particular to their tradition, as well.
...
Missions and parishes of the ROCOR Western Rite use either the Rite of St. Gregory in one of varying uses (Sarum, Christminster, Mount Royal, or Overbeck), the Gallican Rite, or "The English Liturgy," an English Use service based upon the Sarum Use but which adapts a few elements of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Christminster Monastery in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is a Western Orthodox Benedictine monastery, which celebrates the Liturgy of St. Gregory. St. Petroc Monastery in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, celebrates the Sarum Use. St. Petroc has a number of dependencies that follow its liturgical usage, as found in the Saint Colman Prayer Book.

Hieromonk Aidan (Keller, ROCOR) celebrating a Sarum liturgy.
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https://orthodoxwiki.org/Western_Rite

Below is a Western Rite Orthodox website affiliated with the "Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia" (ROCOR)
http://rocor-wr.org/

Their website says:

What Is the Western Rite?

The Western Rite of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia is a concerted effort to reach out to Western Christians in a manner that is thoroughly Orthodox but is also familiar to the tradition(s) that they may be coming from. To accomplish this, the Western Rite Communities have sought to re-establish the Western Church as it existed prior to the Great Schism of AD 1054.
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They have a History section, from which I took some excerpts relating to Anglicanism:

The year 1867 saw [Julian] Overbeck, with 122 signatures from the Oxford Movement, petition the Church of Russia for the establishment of a Western Rite church in full communion with the Eastern Rite. A seven-member synodal commission was then formed, and invited Overbeck to attend. The idea was approved, and Overbeck set about submitting a draft of the proposed Western liturgy, which added an epiclesis and the Trisagion hymn to the Tridentine Mass. This rite was submitted in 1871, and was examined and approved by the commission. Overbeck focused his efforts on the Old Catholic movement, who had rejected Papal Infallibility. He continued to engage in polemics with Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox converts using the Byzantine Rite.

St. Tikhon's involvement in the Western Rite has been more enduring. While he was bishop of the Russian mission in America, some Episcopalians were interested in the possibility of joining Orthodoxy while retaining some form of the Anglican liturgy. St. Tikhon sent the 1892 Book of Common Prayer to the Holy Synod, asking about the possibility. According to Fr. Edward Hughes, St. Raphael of Brooklyn composed the letter of inquiry. In 1904, the Holy Synod admitted its possibility, including edits for its use in an Orthodox manner. It concluded that such edits "can be carried out only on the spot, in America," and found it "desirable to send the 'Observations' themselves to the Right Rev. Tikhon, the American Bishop." ... However, his involvement lay the groundwork for the reception and approved liturgy of some parishes in the Western Rite Vicariate and later the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

Western Rite Orthodoxy, in Australia and New Zealand, has arisen mostly from Anglican and Continuing Anglican communities. Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) of Sydney of ROCOR received some communities under his omophor; while others have been received by Bishop Gibran and Metropolitan Archbishop Paul, both under the Church of Antioch...
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http://rocor-wr.org/history.html

The website above has a list of ROCOR Western Rite parishes and monasteries here:
http://rocor-wr.org/parishes.html

However, the ROCOR is not the only Orthodox Church with Western Rite parishes. The other main Orthodox Church with Western Rite parishes is the Antiochian Orthodox Church. Here is their webpage for Western Rite parishes:
http://www.antiochian.org/western-rite

the Western Rite Vicariate [of the Antiochian Church]... includes more than 20 churches and missions located throughout the United States.
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They have a list of parishes here:
http://www.antiochian.org/parishes/western-rite

A website called Western Rite Information has a long list of Western Rite websites, parishes, and monasteries in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand:
http://westernorthodox.info/links/websites.html
http://westernorthodox.info/links/parishes.html
http://westernorthodox.info/links/monasteries.html

rakovsky · Jun 27, 2016

Below I will cite some commentaries:

Here is a website with some general information on the Western Rite, saying that it especially focuses on the British Isles and on the liturgy of St John Divine:
https://orthodoxwesternrite.wordpress.com/

The site expresses a vision of a national Orthodox Church of the British Isles and one for western Europe, and is a resource for all Orthodox Believers. ...The Ancient pre-schism liturgy used by the church in the British Isles during the first millennium.

...

Fr. Mark Rowe, Dean of Western Rite communities in the USA

The restoration of our Christian heritage.
For a thousand years, from AD37-45 to AD1054-66, the people living in the British Isles and western Europe believed and worshipped God as an integral part of the undivided Orthodox Catholic Church. That Church was governed world wide by five Patriarchs, those of Constantinople (the Ecumenical Patriarch), Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. The Church in the British Isles was a Local Church as was twice legislated by the Witenegemot (parliament) in the AD 700s, having at its head the Metropolitan Archbishop of Canterbury who was connected to the Patriarchs and was an expression of the common Orthodox Christian Faith held together with the other Local Churches throughout the world. The great saints of the British Isles such as Saint Aidan, Saint David, Saint Patrick, Saint Alban, Saint Chad, Saint Cuthbert, Saint Boniface, Saint Dunstan etc., were all members of that Orthodox Catholic Church in the British Isles which continued for a thousand years.

After the Great Schism between the Eastern Church and the smaller Western Church, the Western Rite of worship continued in Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Mount Athos for nearly three hundred years.
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Fr. Geoffrey Kroz writes in his essay "Orthodoxy for Anglicans" along the lines of what Philip has written about the English Church and its connection with Orthodoxy before the Battle of Hastings:

Years ago, my search for historic, English Christianity led me to read the Ecclesiastical History of the English Church by the Venerable Bede. What did I find? An early encounter between the evangelist Saint Augustine, and English king Ethelbert struck me as somehow strange: Augustine’s companions carried images of Christ, painted on boards – «icons» as they are commonly known.

...
Even after the Schism of 1054 – the division between Rome and the rest of the Christian world – England remained in communion with the Eastern Orthodox. In 1066, the Norman Invasion, with backing from the pope of Rome, forced the submission to Frankish Rome of all English churchmen. Rome had already broken communion with the Orthodox East, and changed the Creed and the Conciliar tradition of the Church by elevating one bishop – the Bishop of Rome – above all others.

Why did the English remain in communion with the Orthodox East? Not because the English (and the Irish, Scots, and Welsh, as we would call them today) disliked Rome. The English church was part of the Orthodox church, from its beginnings, until the purge of Orthodox bishops following the Battle of Hastings.

The English were Orthodox, I realized.
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https://orthodoxwesternrite.wordpress.com/b-orthodoxy-for-anglicans

Below is the website of St. Mark's Western Rite church in Colorado:
http://www.westernorthodox.com/the-orthodox-western-rite
It says:

Before the year 1054 there would have been no difficulty in declaring that the Western Rite of the Undivided Church was simply the use of Latin speaking Churches. The Rite used by Christians in Scotland, Ireland and England, was as Orthodox as that used in Constantinople. In the first thousand years of Christendom all the far flung churches that were in communion with the Five Patriarchates (Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome) were Orthodox. After 1054, and more precisely, after the Norman Conquest (1066) of England, the Churches of the West were drawn into the Great Schism of the Roman Patriarchate away from the Unity of the Orthodox Church. The Western Liturgy came to reflect the Papal errors and even incorporated the Filioque in the Nicene Creed with other aberrations.

The restoration of a corrected, and truly Orthodox, Western Rite to Holy Orthodoxy in the United States was not originated by laity or by ordinary clergy. The vision of the Western Rite as an essential part of the Orthodox Mission in America belonged toArchbishop Tikhon of the American Archdiocese under the Moscow Patriarchate. About ninety years ago he examined the existing Anglican Book of Common Prayer and sent it to the Holy Synod of Moscow. That Liturgy, derived from the ancient use of the Orthodox West, and first expressed in English in the edition of 1549 by authority of King Edward the Sixth of England, was corrected and approved by the Holy Synod for Orthodox Church use.
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St Luke's Priory is a Western Rite community in Washington state and it hosts an essay by Fr. Patrick McCauley, What is Western Rite Orthodoxy?
Their website is: http://stlukespriory.com/
The essay says in part:

the Western Rite is a specified form of worship that was used by Christians in Western Europe before the Roman Catholic Church broke with the Orthodox Church. The Western Rite, when compared to Byzantine liturgical forms, is simpler, less redundant, obviously shorter, and employs a hymnody (the hymns used) that are familiar to a great many American Christians. More precisely, the Western Rite, as approved by the Antiochian Archdiocese is a theologically corrected form of worship formerly used by either the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Communion.
In most Western-Rite Orthodox parishes, this means the liturgy is based on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In other Western-Rite congregations, the liturgy may be a Latin or English form of pre-Vatican-II Roman Catholic worship.

For those Western-Rite Christians who use a theologically corrected Anglican liturgy, the modifications, while important, would not be terribly noticeable to even the most regular worshippers from a traditional Episcopal congregation. Two of these alterations include the deletion of the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed and the addition of a stronger epiclesis in the eucharistic prayer said by the priest at the consecration of the bread and wine as the Body and Blood of Christ.

...the Orthodox version of the Western Rite in its Anglican form requires the priest specifically to petition God the Holy Spirit to act in changing the gifts of bread and wine into God’s gift of the life-giving Body and Blood of the Incarnate Son. In addition to these two changes, the Orthodox Church’s Western Rite includes other indiscernible changes that most Anglo-Catholics (old-fashioned, High-Church Episcopalians) would find to be either familiar or certainly acceptable.
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http://stlukespriory.com/What_is_Western-Rite_Orthodoxy_09.doc

Below is a blog on the Roman Rite, which is part of the broader Western Rite:
http://sarisburium.blogspot.com/

Below is a website called Western Rite England, about the Rite in England:
http://westernriteorthodoxuk.org.uk/

See also:
Site on the Western Rite in Omaha
http://omahaorthodox.com/the-western-rite/

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmeman, The Western Rite
http://www.schmemann.org/byhim/westernrite.html

Phoenix · Jun 28, 2016

Since this thread has only one poster, and proselytizing for other churches is against the Terms, I'm closing this.

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