quite as nice as our houses in Western Europe; but it will probably be reasonably clean. You will find in it Western books; your host will be a not altogether uneducated man. He will probably talk French to you. If he is a layman, he will have read papers, and will show an intelligent interest in what is going on in the world, particularly in that West for which he will have an overwhelming secret respect, even if his national loyalty makes him affect to think his own "nation" every bit as good. If he is a priest, he will ask news of Rome, and will discuss theology, liturgy, and the affairs of the Church. In any case, you will feel nothing like that sense of being among a completely different and lower race of people that you cannot help feeling among the other Eastern Christians. I repeat, from every point of view the Uniates are the aristocracy of Eastern Christians. It may not be a very splendid aristocracy, but, compared with the others, it is a real aristocracy, intellectual and moral.
It is much stranger to find sometimes even Catholics who do real injustice to their fellow-Catholics of Eastern rites. One can understand that Protestants are unjust to them. The existence and particularly the superiority of the Uniate Churches is a fact most damaging to their theories of the Papacy as only recognized in the West, to that identification of "Roman Catholic" with "Latin," which is the great point of their branch theory. But of all people we Western Catholics should glory in the Uniate Churches. They are an exceedingly important factor in our concept of the universal Church; they are our great palpable argument that the primacy of Rome is more than Patriarchal rights over part of the Church. Indeed, in some ways, it is just the Uniates who save the whole situation, from our point of view.
To be obliged to reduce the whole Church of Christ to one Patriarchate would be difficult; it would suggest that perhaps our concept is mistaken, that when Patriarchate is divided against Patriarchate there is an internal schism in the Church, which leaves both sides part of the Church, though no longer united.
But this is not the case. On the contrary, within the one united Church all the Patriarchates remain as they did in early days. The fact that vast numbers of the members of the Eastern Patriarchates have gone out of the Church altogether, distressing as it is, does not affect the legal position. In the same way the Latin Patriarchate lost vast quantities of its subjects at the Reformation. In spite of this, in spite of the
