What is Western-Rite Orthodoxy?

Fr. Patrick McCauley

(This article has been edited for brevity)

By AD 2000, approximately 1.433 billion persons, or slightly less than one third of the world’s population, will be Christian, according to David Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia. In spite of these millions of adherents, the percentage of the globe’s population that calls itself Christian will have fallen slightly since 1900.

Sadly, these statistics include folk who claim to be Christian but who are not necessarily active in local congregations. Even more startling for most Americans is the...decline of mainstream American churches since the 1960s, when, according to Christianity Today, Methodists, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and Episcopalians lost literally millions of members. While mainline churches are on a condition of retrenchment for a multiplicity of reasons, conservative Christian bodies continue to grow.

Among those groups that are growing are Christians known as Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox. Orthodoxy in North America claims somewhere between 5 to 6 million adherents. Worldwide, the Orthodox Church has a membership of about 250 million persons, which makes it the second largest Christian body on the globe, with Roman Catholicism’s having a membership of somewhat less than 1 billion.

In the United States, Orthodoxy, which was first brought to North America through Alaska by colonizers from czarist Russia in 1794, has been, until the last few years, a church primarily of immigrants and their descendents from Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. With these new arrivals came their clergy from the old country; so, today in the United States and Canada there are 14 Orthodox jurisdictions that reflect the ethnic make-up of those who originally brought the ancient Christian Faith to these shores.

To the casual observer, the Orthodox Church appears to have much in common with the Roman Catholic Church.

This is of course true in many ways. However, Rome began the process of breaking with the Eastern expression of the catholic faith, i.e. Orthodoxy, in the eleventh century.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy, laying aside differences in regard to the role of the Pope in the life of the universal Church and certain other doctrinal disagreements, is the form of worship followed by most Orthodox Christians.

More specifically, the worship of the overwhelming majority of Orthodox congregations is called Eastern-Rite or Byzantine. This last term comes from the name of the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, Byzantium. Byzantine liturgics (forms of worship) are gloriously beautiful, complex, mostly sung, and quite repetitive from the perspective of contemporary Americans.

Not all Orthodox Christians use the Eastern or Byzantine liturgical forms. The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese sanctions the use of forms of worship that most Americans would perhaps find more familiar.

This liturgical form is known as the Western Rite. More specifically, the Western Rite is a specified form of worship that was used by Christians in Western Europe before the Roman Catholic Church broke with the Orthodox Church.

The Western Rite, when compared to Byzantine liturgical forms, is simpler, less redundant, obviously shorter, and employs a hymnody (the hymns used) that are familiar to a great many American Christians. More precisely, the Western Rite, as approved by the Antiochian Archdiocese is a theologically corrected form of worship formerly used by either the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Communion.

In most Western-Rite Orthodox parishes, this means the liturgy is based on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In other Western-Rite congregations, the liturgy may be a Latin or English form of pre-Vatican-II Roman Catholic worship. In fact, all native French Orthodox Christians, who number in the thousands, use this form in Orthodox Churches in France.

For those Western-Rite Christians who use a theologically corrected Anglican liturgy, the modifications, while important, would not be terribly noticeable to even the most regular worshippers from a traditional Episcopal congregation.

Finally, as mainstream Anglicanism and other mainline Protestant Churches continue their decline and denial of basic catholic faith, doctrine, and worship, and turn to inclusive language liturgies, which refer to God as Mother (to name only one alteration of traditional worship), many traditional catholic Christians of both the Roman and the Anglican Churches are turning to the Orthodox Church. In fact, a goodly number of those who are doing so, have joined congregations that employ the Western Rite.  (We would note that there are also a growing number of Evangelicals who are converting to the Orthodox church).

By doing so, these Christians have retained familiar forms of worship and at the same time insured themselves of remaining within an ecclesiastical communion, and under Godly, Orthodox bishops, who attempt to teach and practice the ancient Gospel of Jesus Christ.