Yes indeed, someone's comments were ignorant.
The Greek Rite was neutral enough to be adopted by the entire east Meditteranean Littoral ... The Syrian Rite was versatile enough to be adopted in the whole of Asia ...
This in no way contradicts the article's statement that "Greek or Syrian liturgies are very much reflective of local national customs and language." You insult the author without disproving his point.
Its difficult to see this proclimation as anything but a reading out of the Church and Christendom of anyone not in the Roman Rite.
What is difficult to see is how you could so blindly misread the article which never says or even implies what you falsely attribute to it.
Christ was not born and crucified to bring us Christian culture.
Wrong. Christ must reign as king not only over individual hearts but over nations as well. How will souls come to know and love Christ as they ought if they live in an anti-Christian culture? Christian culture is the necessary first stage of bringing souls to salvation. When entire countries are not Christian, then you need Christian culture in individual homes. When even homes are not Christian, then you need Christian culture in individual hearts. But Christian culture must exist for souls to come to Christ.
No, it was precisely his point.
This means that the language of the ancient Mass and its ritual is neutral in regard to various cultures. On the contrary Greek or Syrian liturgies are very much reflective of local national customs and language. In the majority of countries using the Roman rite, it was not the Roman liturgy that was adapted to national customs or sentiments, but it was the Roman Liturgy to which a particular culture or nation needed to adapt in order to become Catholic. It was by adopting the rites and traditions of the Roman Missal, Ritual, Calendar and theology that one could adopt a new culture not of Europeans, but a culture into which Catholic Europeans had also been absorbed in order to embrace a truly universal Christian identity, even in regards to the externals of worship.
The author explicitly contrasts the supposedly universally appealing Roman Rite with the particularistic Greek and Syrian Rites. Its difficult to see how the Greek Rite, for example, existing among peoples as disparate as Greeks, Italians, Russians, Turks and Syrian-Arabs, is some how "very much reflective of local national customs", when it is the same Mass Rite celebrated in all those lands, with little thought given at all to nationalistic particularities. There is in fact, much more external unity across the Orthodox Byzantines than ever existed in the Roman Rite.
Similarly, the Roman Rite is litterally suffused with the spirit of Latin Rome. Some Gallican overlays do not make it "universal", nor do they change its naturaly sober and terse bearing (said bearing seeming well adapted to Latins and Germans, but not Africans or Greeks).
"it was the Roman Liturgy to which a particular culture or nation needed to adapt in order to become Catholic"
Were Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Germany "not Catholic" prior to the liturgical revolution of AD 800-1000, which saw the overthrow of the Gallican, Celtic, and Mozarabic liturgies by forcible imposition of the Roman Rite? Were the Slavs not converted by the Slavonic/Glagolitic Missal? What "majority of countries" is he referring to? Lithuania and Scandanavia?
Moreover, anyone with a slight familiarity with the Missals of the middle ages knows that the Roman Calendar was not used everywhere outside Rome, but that each country kept its own set of saints superimposed on a universal calendar used by all Christians for Easter, Christmas, Pentecost, etc.
If you read what this article is really saying, its of one spirit with Marian Horvat's Tradition in Action promotion of the Carolingian Augustinianism of Alcuin and Co. and its courtly behavior as the be all and end all of Catholicism. No surprise her webpage features our murderous father Charlemagne (and I mean that literally, for I understand I am a lineal descendant) and not Constantine or Christ.
The anguished cries of pain from traditional quarters are more over the setting aside of these Carolingian forms as the only legitimate ones for the Church than anything else.
Its difficult to see this proclimation as anything but a reading out of the Church and Christendom of anyone not in the Roman Rite.
What is difficult to see is how you could so blindly misread the article which never says or even implies what you falsely attribute to it.
Again, the author wrote: "a culture into which Catholic Europeans had also been absorbed in order to embrace a truly universal Christian identity, even in regards to the externals of worship"
In other words, one can not embrace this universal Christian identity without unity in externals of worship. It is precisely this nonsensical dogma that is behind the imposition of the Pauline Missal and the supression of the Pian Missal.
One wonders, for example, how the Malabarese Indians have managed to stay Catholic for 2000 years without the supposed benefits of the Roman Rite and Christian European culture, and suffering under the benighted particularity of the Aramaic prayers uttered by Christ Himself offered by the Syrian Rite.
Wrong. Christ must reign as king not only over individual hearts but over nations as well. How will souls come to know and love Christ as they ought if they live in an anti-Christian culture?
I don't know, they seem to have muddled through for about 2000 years now with many Christians living in anti-Christian cultures. The early apologists were not troubled by this, nor has it troubled the salvation of Christians who lived outside the later Christianized Roman Empire.
Maybe you are forgetting "Jesus answered: My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would certainly strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now my kingdom is not from hence." (St. John 18.36)
Christian culture is the necessary first stage of bringing souls to salvation.
Salvation is not a work from man. God calls His own irrespective of where they are found, so their salvation certainly will not come at first from Christian culture.
When even homes are not Christian, then you need Christian culture in individual hearts.
That is the only real Christian kingdom. Hanging up crucifixes and images in a home does not make it "Christian". It is how the people who inhabit it living in Christ that makes it so. Neither does flowerly Christian language in government documents and Kings participating in Corpus Christi processions make a country Christian. Many countries in Europe did this, but the abominable behavior of their governments (as with, for example, the fomenting of the 30 Years War by "Catholic" France, or the repeated attempts by Frankish nobility from the beginning to subjugate the Church) belied their false pieties. Homes and countries will not be going to heaven and Christ did not come to save them, but only people. It is the existence of Christian people who imbue a Christian spirit into an intangible, not the intangible imbuing Christian spirit into people. All these laments about the demise of Catholic Culture are totally bassackwards. If there has been any demise, it is within ourselves. The Holy Trinity is dwelling within us. He never dwelt within any country or home except to the extent that the people there were good Catholics.