This was not a Sunday, and so many Orthodox (especially in the US, where so many Orthodox churches have pews) do kneel on Sundays! (maybe it's time SCOBA starts asking all those communities to remove them and start worshiping like the Orthodox did since the beginning).
But your comment is spot on because I do not understand how the Latins started to kneel on Sundays if they fully recognize (and therefore abide by) the First Ecumenical Council's decisions. I guess that will be another topic...but again the Orthodox have no leg to stand on as long as they imitate Western Christians in America and are breaking their own obligations with the Councils.
I sincerely doubt that the Patriarch was intimating any such thing at all. This simply would never happen with us. We wouldn't allow it, period, end of discussion
I agree. The message is no different than any other message. We do not proselytize among Christians. If asked, we show how we worship and tell what we believe. There is no attempt to convert, or to diminish the other side.
That being said, I believe that the Pope and the Patriarch agreed on the texts of their homilies and the message they were to convey.
I know the Liturgy was not a Sunday Liturgy; that's why I said the canon referred to Sundays. The reason I even mentioned it is that it struck me as odd that Fr. Z commented on it.
"I guess that will be another topic...but again the Orthodox have no leg to stand on as long as they imitate Western Christians in America and are breaking their own obligations with the Councils."
Well, that's certainly true and it is a topic for another time, but I will say that the argument supporting kneeling on Sundays is that the canon is a disciplinary one peculiar to the times it was written, when daily attendance at the Liturgy was common. I don't say I agree with that; indeed I don't, but that is the argument. By they way, I've seen kneeling during the consecration on Sundays in Greece in small villages and large cities so its more widespread than simply America.
By the way, BAC & P, who is this Fr. Z?
liturgical discipline. the church, which established the no kneeling, can, later, reform that discipline
We don't generally consider that the disciplinary (as distinct from doctrinal) canons of e.g. Nicaea I apply to us, or apply in perpetuity, or anything like that.
"Don't kneel on Sunday" is a disciplinary thing. I think it's fine that the East maintains it, but as far as we're concerned, we haven't followed that particular canon for centuries, if indeed we ever did.