many heresies and schisms which at various times have robbed each Patriarchate of its members, the constitution of the Catholic Church remains what it has always been, not one Patriarchate with one rite, but the union of East and West, differing in rites, having in many cases different details of Canon Law, but united in the profession of the same faith and in conscious inter-communion. It is just the Uniates who safeguard this position.
Yet so little do many Catholics in the West realize this position, so little conscious have they been of their fellow-Catholics in the East, that one still finds people who make the fatal mistake of confusing our one Patriarchate with the whole Church. When one hears Catholics say that no Catholic priest may be married, that all Catholics have exactly the same Mass all over the world, one sees to what blunders this confusion between our Western Patriarchate and the whole Church of Christ may lead. It is only from ignorance, because in the West we so rarely see a Catholic of an Eastern rite, that our people when they go to the East sometimes make that most injurious mistake of treating the Uniates as if they were in some way rather less perfect Catholics than we are.
Western people get so used to look upon our Roman rite as the only correct one that they are inclined to think a man who does not use it a kind of half-Catholic, better than the schismatics, but not quite so good as we are. Or when they meet a married Catholic priest they look upon his state as a temporary toleration which had better be done away with. Really he is obeying the Canon Law of his Patriarchate, to which he has just as much right as we have to our laws.
Does anyone think St Athanasius, St Basil, St John Chrysostom imperfect Catholics? The modern Uniate stands exactly where they stood. Like them he is in communion with the chief of all Patriarchs at Rome; like them he acknowledges the primacy of the Pope and obeys him as Primate. But like them he is not bound by local Western Patriarchal laws; like them he thinks his laws and rite and customs just as good as ours. It is really as absurd for us Latins to think our own Patriarchate the whole Church as it would be for a Melkite to think us imperfect Catholics because we do not use the Byzantine rite.
And from every point of view we Latins owe all possible honour to our brothers the Uniates. They not only save the situation canonically, they are the most splendid example of Catholic loyalty in the world. For the Pope's cause is in some
