This is a fantastic piece and well worth reading for all Roman Catholics and Orthodox. This is not a critique but rather a comment. Like yourself there are many elements of the Eastern Rite that interest me and I would love to hear a Byzantine Mass. But, being of Western European descent I am very much at home in the Latin Rite. The scholasticism you mentioned won me over from Protestantism. Again, not in anyway a critique of the work. I would be curious if you are of Eastern European descent and hence drawn in that regard. Deo gratias!
I think scholasticism is a powerful tool in the Catholic arsenal to affect conversions. It can be misunderstood, and it has limitations, but St. Aquinas and many others have bought millions to the Catholic Church by leveraging it to explain the faith in great detail. As Eastern Catholics, we don’t need to reject scholasticism, but the Orthodox by and large do because they lack a Western element, Western Orthodoxy notwithstanding (it’s very small and heavily Easternized).
I myself am of Italian/Irish/Jewish origin, but the Eastern Rites have a higher than might be expected amount of Italian-American and Jewish Catholic parishioners. I grew up Protestant, and so I was not very connected to the Roman Rite, and when I left Protestantism, I was looking to Orthodoxy initially, and the way the Orthodox framed theology made great sense to me, and I could see taking that message to others easily. So, it was good to discover that this theology is also Catholic, similar to how Thomism, Molinism, Scotism etc are Catholic.
This is a fantastic piece and well worth reading for all Roman Catholics and Orthodox. This is not a critique but rather a comment. Like yourself there are many elements of the Eastern Rite that interest me and I would love to hear a Byzantine Mass. But, being of Western European descent I am very much at home in the Latin Rite. The scholasticism you mentioned won me over from Protestantism. Again, not in anyway a critique of the work. I would be curious if you are of Eastern European descent and hence drawn in that regard. Deo gratias!
I think scholasticism is a powerful tool in the Catholic arsenal to affect conversions. It can be misunderstood, and it has limitations, but St. Aquinas and many others have bought millions to the Catholic Church by leveraging it to explain the faith in great detail. As Eastern Catholics, we don’t need to reject scholasticism, but the Orthodox by and large do because they lack a Western element, Western Orthodoxy notwithstanding (it’s very small and heavily Easternized).
I myself am of Italian/Irish/Jewish origin, but the Eastern Rites have a higher than might be expected amount of Italian-American and Jewish Catholic parishioners. I grew up Protestant, and so I was not very connected to the Roman Rite, and when I left Protestantism, I was looking to Orthodoxy initially, and the way the Orthodox framed theology made great sense to me, and I could see taking that message to others easily. So, it was good to discover that this theology is also Catholic, similar to how Thomism, Molinism, Scotism etc are Catholic.