Light of the East—in South Florida
Miami’s Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Dormition
Part I in a Series
By LexEtLibertas
If there is one cultural indicator which most vividly illustrates the decline and decadence of modern Catholicism, it is by far the degeneration of the Roman liturgy from the late 1960s. It is this writer’s conviction that each of the crises besetting the modern church (theological dissent, the sexual depravity of the clergy, the aloof indifference of the episcopate, smug clericalism, the failure of nominally Catholic peoples to effectively resist the inroads of the culture of death into their public institutions) can all be summarized thusly: Catholics have lost the sense of the sacred.
And this quintessential Catholic sensibility is uniquely concretized in the worship the Church offers to the Supreme Deity. The Church’s splendid liturgical patrimony, alongside the Lives of her saints, is perhaps her principal non-rational apologetic: the invisible splendor of her truths finds visible expression in her solemn administration of her sacraments, her performance of which have inspired those great artistic monuments which are so treasured by all humanity, even the non-believer.
And yet, since 1969, the Church has practically abandoned this patrimony, to the extent that the average worshipper’s experience at a Catholic church bears little resemblance to the historic Christian conception of liturgy, as Catholic ceremonial today has about as much solemnity as a children’s reenactment of a Sesame Street episode.
The tragic flaw of modern Catholic liturgy is its discontinuity not only with its own Catholic predecessors, but even with the traditions of other Christian churches (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian, High Protestant) and even non-Christian religions, whose own ceremonial speaks to that sense of the sacred, that yearning for the transcendent, which so characterizes the human spirit, and whose dearth is all the more absent at the local Catholic parish. It is, too, this writer’s conviction that modern Catholic liturgical praxis is for these reasons fatally detrimental to both ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. In terms of raw aesthetic, the sacral orientation of a Hindu temple has far more affinity with the Catholic tradition than does the typical celebration of the Novus Ordo Missae.
And Florida has been no exception to these trends: indeed, the state has, in so many ways, over the years exemplified everything banal, heterodox, and otherwise pernicious about the so-called “Spirit of Vatican II.” But this generalization ought not to take away from all the good that has come out of the Catholic Church in Florida , and, liturgically-speaking, Catholics in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties have been singularly indebted to the work of several Eastern Catholic parishes which have humbly preserved the liturgical heritage unapologetically abdicated by the local Roman-rite establishment.
And outstanding among these parishes is Miami ’s Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Dormition.
We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.
Thus spake the emissaries of Saint Vladimir of Kiev , when they witnessed the Divine Liturgy at Constantinople ’s Hagia Sophia in the 10th century. The experience is said to have been the deciding factor in the conversion of the people of Kieven Rus from paganism to Byzantine Catholic Christianity.
sounds like a wonderful parish. But when I see pews, stained glass windows, mixed men and women, and what seem to be Stations of the Cross on the walls, I wonder what other latinizations are going on.
Hey, Joe.
There is little-to-nothing “Latinized” about this parish, honestly. I say this as a long-time worshipper at Orthodox Churches, Greek and Slavic.
For starters, those are not Stations of the Cross on the wall; they are icons from the Lives of Christ and the Theotokos.
Secondly, contrary to some Orthodox myths, the Eastern churches ae not, and never have been static. They are living evolving entities. If you think for a moment that Saint Andrew celebrated the Divine Liturgy in precisely the same manner, with precisely the same implements, as modern Orthodox priests do, you’d be kidding yourself.
And so there’s nothing wrong, as far as I see, with some “Latinizations,” some healthy cross-pollination between the rites. There has always been such a cultural exchange within Catholic and Orthodox Christendom, and why not?
All that having been said, each and every one of the things you’ve mentioned (“pews, stained glass windows, mixed men and women”) are found in perhaps the vast majority of Orthodox churches in the United States. I’ll leave it to the theologians to determine whether these are legitimate organic developments; suffice it to say that they’re not inherently un-Orthodox.