THIS little book is intended to supply not so much matter for
controversy as a certain amount of information about the Orthodox
Church. People in the West have too long forgotten that enormous
mass of their fellow Christians who live on the other side of the
Adriatic Sea and the river Vistula, and now that Anglicans
especially have begun to take an interest in what they look upon as
another branch of the Church, it seems regrettable that English
Catholics as a rule have only the vaguest and the most inaccurate
ideas about the people whom they confuse under the absurd name of
"Greeks." During the late war one saw how widespread were such
ideas as that the Russian clergy were under the Patriarch of
Constantinople and said Mass in Greek. It is chiefly with the hope
of rectifying such mistakes that the book has been written. There
is nothing in it that has not been said often and better before,
and the only excuse for its publication is that there does not seem
to be yet anything of the kind from the Catholic point of view in
English. As it is written for Catholics I have generally supposed
that point of view and have not filled up the pages by repeating
once more arguments for the Primacy, Infallibility of the Pope and
so on, such as can be easily found already in the publications of
the Catholic Truth Society. ... The other point is the use of the
word Orthodox. Since the schism I have called the people in union
with the Ecumenical Patriarch so. Of course the name then has a
special and technical meaning. Orthodox in its real sense is just
what we believe them not to be, But, in the first place, it seems
impossible to find any other name. Eastern is too wide, the Copts
and Armenians form Eastern Churches, Schismatic involves the same
difficulty, besides being needlessly offensive. We do not in
ordinary conversation speak of Protestants as heretics. The name
commonly used, Greek, is the worst of all. The only body that ever
calls itself, or can with any sort of reason be called the Greek
Church, is the Established Church of the kingdom of Greece j and
that is only one, and a very small one, of the sixteen bodies that
make up this great Communion. To call the millions of Russians, who
say their prayers in Old Slavonic and obey the Holy Synod at
Petersburg, Greeks is as absurd as calling us all Italians. There
is no parallel with our name Roman. We use the Roman liturgy in the
Roman language and obey the Roman Patriarch. They use the Byzantine
liturgy in all sorts of languages, and the enormous majority obey
no Patriarch at all. Byzantine Orthodox would more or less
correspond to Roman Catholic, but the Byzantine Patriarch has no
jurisdiction outside his reduced Patriarchate and occupies a very
different position from that of the Roman Pope. And then courteous
and reasonable people generally call any religious body by the name
it calls itself. We have no difficulty in speaking of Evangelicals
in Germany, the Church of England at home, and the Salvation Army
everywhere. Of course one conceives these names as written in
inverted commas, like those of the Holy Roman and the Celestial
Empires. In the same way most people call us Catholics. Naturally
all Christians believe that they are members of the Universal
Church of Christ, and most of them profess their faith in it when
they say the Creed. The way in which High Church Anglicans have
suddenly realized this and have discovered that they would give
away their own case by calling us Catholics is astonishingly naive.
Of course they think that they are really Catholics too so do all
Christians. And we never imagined that we are called so except as a
technical name which happens to have become ours, and which even
Turks give only to us. The body about which this book treats always
calls itself the Orthodox Eastern Church, and in the East we call
them Orthodox and they call us Catholics, and no one thinks for a
moment that either uses these names except as technical terms.
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