Before the year 1054 there would have been no difficulty in
declaring that the Western Rite of the Undivided Church was
simply the use of Latin speaking Churches. The Rite used by
Christians in Scotland, Ireland and England, was as Orthodox as
that used in Constantinople. In the first thousand years of
Christendom all the far flung churches that were in communion
with the Five Patriarchates (Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch,
Alexandria, Rome) were Orthodox. After 1054, and more precisely,
after the Norman Conquest (1066) of England, the Churches of the
West were drawn into the Great Schism of the Roman Patriarchate
away from the Unity of the Orthodox Church. The Western Liturgy
came to reflect the Papal errors and even incorporated the
Filioque in the Nicene Creed with other aberrations.
The restoration of a corrected, and truly Orthodox, Western
Rite to Holy Orthodoxy in the United States was not originated
by laity or by ordinary clergy. The vision of the Western Rite
as an essential part of the Orthodox Mission in America belonged
to Archbishop Tikhon of the American Archdiocese under the
Moscow Patriarchate. About ninety years ago he examined the
existing Anglican Book of Common Prayer and sent it to the Holy
Synod of Moscow. That Liturgy, derived from the ancient use of
the Orthodox West, and first expressed in English in the edition
of 1549 by authority of King Edward the Sixth of England, was
corrected and approved by the Holy Synod for Orthodox Church
use.
In the years following, blessed Tikhon was himself elevated
to Patriarch of Moscow, martyred by the communists in 1925,
since declared a Saint of the Church, and thus known to Orthodox
faithful throughout the world as St. Tikhon, Enlightener of
America. This is the same Saint Tikhon who, about the time he
obtained approval for the restoration of the Western Rite in
America, also consecrated (in 1904) Raphael Hawaweeny to the
episcopate of the Orthodox Church of North America, from which
the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese descends.
As the Orthodox Mission in America grew in numbers and in
maturity, further authorization of the Western Rite was given by
the Patriarchs and Holy Synod of Antioch. Metropolitan Anthony (Bashir)
founded the Western Rite Vicariate for the creation of Western
Rite Missions and Parishes in the Archdiocese. In May of 2011,
the Synod of Bishops for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of
Russia established a Western Rite Vicariate. His Grace Bishop
Jerome of Manhattan was appointed assistant to the First
Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad in ministering to these
communities. Western Rite Orthodoxy is now a rapidly
growing dimension of the Church's Mission in America.
The Western Rite Orthodox Parishes today represent a restoration of the
legitimate Western Liturgy of the Undivided Church of the first
1,000 years, by Patriarchal authority, for the benefit of all
Orthodox people.
