is used practically throughout the Roman Patriarchate,[1] as is natural; each Patriarchate has its uniform rite. But the Popes have never tried to force their liturgy on Catholics of the other Patriarchates. Still, as always, the Catholics of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and the Melkites who represent Constantinople use their own venerable rites, as do the Catholic Armenians and Chaldees. And that in the Catholic Church the Latin Patriarchate is now so enormously greater than all the others put together is due simply to accident. On the one hand the Western lands have grown and flourished, and have been enlarged by two new continents — America and Australia — while the East remained stagnant and was overrun by Islam. No one could foresee this when Rome took for her Patriarchate Italy, Illyricum, and then the wild and desolate lands of North-Western Europe, full of savages that she was to convert, whereas Alexandria had the fat land of Egypt, Antioch had flourishing Syria, and at Constantinople was the splendour of Cæsar's new home. On the other hand, most of the Eastern Christians have fallen into schism; and so, of course, there are only a few (about five millions) to represent their rites inside the Catholic Church, as against the 225 million Latins. But if ever that schism be healed, then a more equal proportion would be established between our different liturgies, and with a Catholic Russia that would, of course, go on using her own Byzantine rite in Old Slavonic, no one could any longer so completely forget the Eastern Catholics as to say that all our priests say the same Mass, or that Latin is the language of the whole Catholic Church. Meanwhile, whereas the preponderance of the Latin rite with us is due to quite natural and unforeseen causes, the exclusive use of the Byzantine rite among the Orthodox is due to the systematic jealousy and ambition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. They, not Rome, are the centralizers who ignore history for the sake of uniformity, and when people accuse the Pope of having crushed national Churches they mistake the culprit, they mean the Patriarch of New Rome, not the Pope of Old Rome.
In one point, however, there is no attempt at uniformity among the Orthodox — in language. Whereas they must all
- ↑ Except, of course, for the Ambrosian and Mozarabic rites.
