Posted on 05/08/2006 12:11:18 PM PDT by NYer
The small group of Eastern-rite Catholics who gather each week in Sacred Heart Parish’s former church building in Wasilla now belong to a bona fide church community of their own. Blessed Theodore Romzha Byzantine Catholic Mission was established Feb. 16 by Byzantine Catholic Bishop Most Reverend William Skurla.
The new "mission" — a precursor to a parish — is associated with the only Byzantine Catholic parish in Alaska: St. Nicholas of Myra in Anchorage, founded in 1958.
So, what is a Byzantine Catholic?
The Catholic Church contains 23 rites, or liturgical expressions. The vast majority of people who call themselves Catholic belong to the Roman Catholic Church, which follows the Latin rite.
The Byzantine Catholic Church is one of the 22 Eastern-rite Catholic churches. It follows the liturgical traditions of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, but unlike them, it recognizes the Roman Catholic pope as the head of the church.
For the last four years, the Matanuska Valley’s Byzantine Catholics have been worshiping in the old Sacred Heart Church on Wasilla’s Bogard Road.
Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic parish, moved into a larger church on the parish grounds in 1998. The pastor, Father Kasparaj Mallavarapu, welcomed the Eastern-rite group to use the old church.
Right Reverend Archimandrite Wesley Izer, pastor of St. Nicholas of Myra Parish, originally made the 45-mile trip from Anchorage to Wasilla about once a month. He would celebrate Divine Liturgy — the Eastern-rite term for Mass — for about a dozen Byzantine Catholic families.
But about a year into the "outreach" project, Father Izer’s bishop requested that he begin making the trip every week.
The group is not vastly bigger — Father Izer said about 16 families now regularly attend — but because of the convenience factor, "now we see everybody more consistently."
The change has brought the people "closer to the Lord" and helped them "create a sense of community, too," Father Izer said.
The Byzantine church has its own system of jurisdiction, with bishops appointed to lead "eparchies," the equivalent of dioceses in the Latin-rite church. Both rites often designate a Catholic community a "mission" when it has reached a certain level of stability but isn’t yet able to support itself as an independent parish.
Becoming a mission gives parishioners a "sense of belonging," said Michelle Hand, who attends the mission in Wasilla with her husband and eight children.
"We’re here to stay and we’re growing and we’re a part of our community," she said.
The Hands used to attend Roman Catholic parishes in Palmer and Eagle River, but they continued to search for a "reverent Mass to raise our kids in" she said.
She said they found that at Anchorage’s St. Nicholas of Myra in Anchorage, but the weekly drive was time-consuming and costly.
"It’s been super-duper nice to not have to drive into town" for the past three years that Divine Liturgy has been offered weekly in Wasilla, Hand said.
The group may be small, but that has its benefits, too, she said. The survival of the mission depends on the volunteer involvement of everyone, she added.
Hand helped organize a group of about 15 people last summer to repaint the interior of the church, and families rotate vacuuming, cleaning, setting up chairs and preparing the sanctuary area each Sunday.
"The kids learn that it’s their obligation to support their church," Hand said.
It will likely be five to 10 years before Blessed Theodore Romzha Mission is ready to become a parish, according to Father Izer.
Nevertheless, nine months ago, the mission purchased land for a future church in Wasilla; the site is near East Seldon Road and North Wasilla-Fishhook Road.
Gloria Tokar said having a church of their own is important to Eastern-rite Catholics because the method of worship is very sensual and guided by the church’s atmosphere — the colors, the icons and symbols — which is meant to conjure the "beauty of heaven."
"The American dream is, like, owning your own home," Tokar said. "For a Byzantine Catholic, it’s having your own church, your own place of worship where you can contemplate God and your religion."
Art Hippler, a retired university professor, spent about a decade making the 104-mile round trip from his Wasilla home to Anchorage’s St. Nicholas of Myra Parish.
It was a worthwhile burden though, Hippler said, because the Eastern-rite Divine Liturgy is "profound, interesting, very reverent" as opposed to the "pretty sloppy and politically correct and essentially a childish version" of liturgy that he feels exists throughout the archdiocese’s Roman Catholic churches.
Now, with his wife and 17-year-old daughter, he drives only about six miles for Sunday liturgy and has time afterward to stick around and visit with other parishioners.
Establishing a parish in the Matanuska Valley was a dream of the late Right Reverend Mitered Archpriest Michael Artim, who came to Anchorage’s St. Nicholas of Myra in 1964 when it served only ten families and had less than $20 in the bank, according to Father Izer.
As the parish matured, some St. Nicholas families moved to the Valley, and by 2001, a dozen were living there. The parish soon launched the "outreach" in Wasilla to accommodate them.
Father Artim died in 2001 at the age of 85. He bequeathed funds and furniture from his private home-chapel to the mission’s development.
Now, Father Izer wears one of Father Artim’s vestments on Sunday, reads from his Book of the Gospels and is surrounded by Father Artim’s chapel furniture when he celebrates Divine Liturgy for the slowly growing mission.
Father Artim "saw a vision of the church spreading," Father Izer said.
To learn more about the Byzantine Catholic Church, click here .
To learn more about the other Eastern Catholic Churches, click here.
Proselytizing.
Innocent of Alaska
St. Innocent of Alaska
Our father among the saints Innocent of Alaska, Equal-to-the-Apostles and Enlightener of North America (1797-1879), was a Russian Orthodox priest, bishop, archbishop, and Metropolitan of Moscow and all Russia. He is known for his missionary work, scholarship, and leadership in Alaska and the Russian Far East during the 1800s. He is known for his great zeal for his work as well as his great abilities as a scholar, linguist, and administrator. He was a missionary, later a bishop and archbishop in Alaska and the Russian Far East. He learned several native languages and was the author of many of the earliest scholarly works about the natives and their languages, as well as dictionaries and religious works in these languages. He also translated parts of the Bible into several native languages.
St. Innocent, né Ivan (John) Evseyevich Popov-Veniaminov, was born on August 26, 1797, into the family of a church server in the village of Anginskoye, Verkholensk District, Irkutsk province, in Russia. His father died when John was six.
In 1807, John entered the Irkutsk Theological Seminary. In 1817 he married, and on May 18, 1817 he was ordained deacon of the Church of the Annunciation in Irkutsk. He completed his studies in 1818. He was appointed a teacher in a parish school, and on May 18, 1821 he was ordained priest to serve in the Church of the Annunciation.
At the beginning of 1823, Bishop Michael of Irkutsk received instructions to send a priest to the island of Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. Father John Veniaminov volunteered to go, and on May 7, 1823, he departed from Irkutsk, accompanied by his aging mother, his wife, his infant son Innocent, and his brother Stefan. After a difficult one-year journey, they arrived at Unalaska on July 29, 1824.
After John and his family built and moved into an earthen hut, he undertook the construction of a church on the island and set about studying the local languages and dialects. He trained some of his parishioners in construction techniques and with them undertook the construction of a church, which was finished the following July.
Father John's parish included the island of Unalaska and the neighboring Fox Islands and Pribilof Islands, whose inhabitants had been converted to Christianity before his arrival, but retained many of their pagan ways and customs. Father John often traveled between the islands in a canoe, battling the stormy Gulf of Alaska.
His travels over the islands greatly enhanced Father John Veniaminov's familiarity with the local dialects. In a short time he mastered six of the dialects. He devised an alphabet of Cyrillic letters for the most widespread dialect, the Unagan dialect of Aleut and, in 1828, translated portions of the Bible and other church material into that dialect. In 1829, he journeyed to the Bering Sea coast of the Alaskan mainland and preached to the people there.
In 1834, Father John was transferred to Sitka Island, to the town of Novoarkhangelsk, later called Sitka. He devoted himself the Tlingit people and studied their language and customs. His studies there produced the scholarly works Notes on the Kolushchan and Kodiak Tongues and Other Dialects of the Russo-American Territories, with a Russian-Kolushchan Glossary.
In 1838, Father John journeyed to St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, and Kiev, Ukraine, to report on his activities and request an expansion of the Church's activities in Russian America. While he was there, he received notice that his wife had died. He requested permission to return to Sitka. Instead, it was suggested that he take vows as a monk. Father John at first ignored these suggestions, but, on November 29, 1840, made his vows. He chose the name Innocent in honor of Bishop Innocent of Irkutsk.
On December 15, 1840, Archimandrite Innocent Veniaminov was consecrated Bishop of Kamchatka and Kuril Islands in Russia and the Aleutian Islands in Russian America. His see was located in Novoarkhangelsk, which he returned to in September 1841. He spent the next nine years in the administration of his see as well as on several long missionary journeys to its remote areas. On April 21, 1850, Bishop lnnocent was elevated to Archbishop. In 1852, the Yakut area was admitted to the Kamchatka Diocese, and in September 1853, Archbishop Innocent took up permanent residence in the town of Yakutsk. Innocent took frequent trips throughout his enlarged diocese. He devoted much energy to the translation of the scriptures and service books into the Yakut (Sakha) language.
In April 1865, Archbishop Innocent was appointed a member of the Holy Governing Synod of the Church.
On November 19, 1867, he was appointed the Metropolitan of Moscow, replacing his friend and mentor, Filaret, who had died. While there, he undertook revisions of many Church texts that contained errors, raised funds to improve the living conditions of priests and established a retirement home for priests.
Innocent died on March 31, 1879. He was buried on April 5, 1879, at Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra.
http://www.orthodoxwiki.org/Innocent_of_Alaska
This is in my Eparchy. Bishop William Skurla tends to travel a lot.
So what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that is that there cannot be union between the Roman church and the Orthodox church while the Roman church is still trying to pull people away from the Orthodox church.
Saint Paul had a reason for saying he made a point of not preaching the gospel to those where it had already been preached.
Not!
Who has this priest pulled away from the Orthodox Church?
Bulldoze every Orthodox church in Western and Central Europe, and Quebec, and Latin America, and then we'll talk. Until then, you're asking us to play by one set of rules while you play by another.
The article said this congregation has about 16 members. The Hand family, above, accounts for four; Art Hippler and his wife and daughter (who were Byzantines who used to travel long distances to a different parish) brings it up to seven; and it doesn't say anything about targetting Orthodox for conversions. It sounds to me like their main source of new people would be Western (Latin-rite) Catholics looksing for the beauty and wisdom of the East.
If this were a matter of trying to split and wreck local Orthodox parishes, I'd agree with you. But that's nowhere in the article.
Correct me, friend, if I'm wrong.
I did not realize you were Byzantine! That makes 3 of you in the forum.
No one is trying to pull anyone away from Orthodoxy these days, as the Vatican has forbidden proselytism of the Orthodox.
Today, more people who come into the Byzantine Catholic Church are either ex-Protestants such as myself or Roman Catholics who can't take the BS in their own church anymore.
It's still non canonical and further makes a mess of any potential re-union.
Also Catholics should not seek the eastern rite simply for it's beauty.
Central Europe where exactly? The eastern church extended to much of central Europe as well as parts of Northern Europe canonically long before Rome did, as well as parts of North America long before Rome did.
Further it is ROME which is insisting there should be reunion and petitioning the Orthodox for reunion, petitioning them to play by a set of rules you openly reject is dishonest, and against the spirit of reunion.
Exactly. There are two sets of rules big time. In fact if the Antiochian Christian Archdiocese of North America continues to open up churches in areas that have been under the traditional Roman Catholic Jurisidction then I am not so sure why this should not be encouraged bigtime. These Churches are poping up all over the South even in areas that have a established Orthodox Church or within easy distance of one.
Why can't Eastern rite Catholics evanglize. I understand that there is a concern here with relations between the Orthodox and Catholics. But I doubt they are going and actively seeking out Orthodox to convert
Non-canonical?
It should not be encouraged because Roman promised to cease proselytizing.
If the Vatican did make such a promise, there should be some reciprocity on the part of the Orthodox.
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