Faux Orthodox...is a good name for them. Seems like they really want to be Orthodox but they just gotta love that POPE... just gotta!
Snide. We are not "faux" anything. We are Eastern Catholics. We are NOT Orthodox, and don't wish to be. I'm really sorry to disappoint you...
"Faux Orthodox...is a good name for them. Seems like they really want to be Orthodox but they just gotta love that POPE... just gotta!"
Just a personal opinion, but I don't think they are "faux" anything. Every Eastern Rite Catholic I have known has been a very faithful and fine Eastern Christian. They are what they are more because of accidents of history than anything else. The overwhelming majority I know are "cradle", Maronites (all immigrants) or Melkites or Eastern European "Greek Catholics". Not one of those cradle types has anything at all good to say about Latin Rite ecclesiology as it has developed over the past, say, 300 years and they know and care little or nothing about what happened before that. They have a very Eastern attitude towards hierarchs, which is to say, they remember +John Chrysostomos' comment about the floor of hell. As a group, I find them far more hostile to Rome than most Orthodox I know since, I suppose, their unfortunate experiences with Roman ways are far more fresh than ours as Orthodox and they are sort of caught in Rome's embrace. Their prayer life and spirituality is distinctly Orthodox. The Melkites and Maronites see themselves as fully Orthodox with some sort of tie to the Pope, but nothing beyond that. The Eastern Europeans seem to see themselves as neither fish nor fowl...and they don't seem to like that one bit. I should qualify the foregoing by saying that I only know well a couple of eastern Rite priests, both Melkites and no hierarchs. I did speak with a Ruthenian hierarch once some years ago on a legal matter. He seemed at pains to convince me he was really Orthodox, which struck me as strange at the time. I haven't heard that from the laity I know.
The attitude of converts to the Eastern Rites may be different, but I don't know any of them save here on FR.
Faux? Nope, nothing faux about them at all, LIW!
"Faux Orthodox...is a good name for them. Seems like they really want to be Orthodox but they just gotta love that POPE... just gotta!"
Your comment was inflammatory and uncalled for.
Eastern Catholics are quite happy being exactly that: eastern Catholic. While the liturgy and traditions of the eastern Catholic churches are often very similar to those of the Orthodox churches, there are differences.
As for the relationship between eastern Catholics and their western bretheren, the incidents discussed toward the end of this article lend something of an insight. Eastern Catholics have often been treated very poorly.