senses; their loyalty saw in her, not only the Church of the Prince-Apostle, not only the Patriarchal See; she was the mother who had borne them. From Rome, sent by a Pope, had come the apostles to whom they owed the faith, it was Rome that had founded their dioceses, ordained their first bishops. In the case of the great Eastern Churches there was no such special relation of filial piety. Their bishops traced their lines straight back to the first disciples of all, many of them were themselves Apostolic Churches and therefore, in this regard, on the same level as Rome. They had their own ancient liturgies and customs and had never been affected by the Roman use, the Roman Calendar. True, in the West, too, there were other liturgies, but all the time the Roman Mass was spreading throughout the Pope's Patriarchate, influencing the other Latin rites, till at last it took their place everywhere, save in one or two corners. The Papal Mass, the "use of the Roman Curia" throughout the West was the great architype to be admired and copied; but to Eastern Christians it was an utterly strange thing, of which they understood nothing, not even the language.
It seems absurd to us that a difference of language should be so great a barrier; but it is true that one of the great causes of estrangement between the two halves of Christendom was that they could not understand each other, simply because some talked Latin and some Greek. Here Rome had the advantage. There was always a Greek colony there and Greek monasteries. There have been, even as late as in the 7th and 8th centuries, Greek Popes.[1] So the Romans could always manage to get a Greek letter translated. But the Greeks could not understand Latin. The Roman Court since it had been fixed at Constantinople had become completely Hellenized. The whole body of Latin literature, sacred or profane, was a closed book to the Byzantines. At first Law, the Ius Romanum, had still been taught in Latin and St. Gregory the Wonder-worker († 270),
- ↑ Theodore I (642–649) was a Greek from Jerusalem, St. Agatho (678–681), a Sicilian Greek, John V (685–686), a Syrian. The last Greek Pope was a Cretan, Alexander V (Peter Philargios, 1409–1410), set up by the Synod of Pisa. He is counted among the Alexanders, but was really an anti-pope. Gregory XII (1406–1415) was the legitimate Pope.
