THE ORIGIN OF RITES

As churches were established in the fourth century, definite patterns of worship began to appear. The great centers of civilization and learning, places like Antioch, Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and the like, began to develop their own distinctive practices, based largely on their local cultures. The characteristic number of hymns, the formats and timing of processions of clergy and people, the uses of aids like incense and ornate vestments and the very patterns of the vestments themselves, began gradually to become more and more fixed. Areas surrounding these centers of learning tended to imitate them in this area as they would have in others: in the areas of literature, music, the arts; liturgy would not have been exempted from the normal instinct of people to adapt from the familiar only gradually - such that even that to which they were adapting would already be familiar.

In this fashion grew up the major liturgical families - those groups we call "rites." Rome, Alexandria (Egypt's Alexandria, not Asia Minor's), Antioch (Syrian Antioch, not Pisidian Antioch), and in very short order, at Constantinople, the Eastern Capital of the Empire.

From these great centers of culture and learning missionaries left to visit and to teach neighboring countries. They naturally carried with them what they knew. It is impossible to carry with one knowledge one does not have. The forms of the liturgy as they were accustomed to them accompanied them. Where those missions were distant and communications slow and frequent of disruption, variations crept in, adapting themselves to the new local cultures, so that eventually, even newer rites were formed. So the Eastern Syrians in modern-day Iraq and Persia came to differ somewhat from the Syrians at Antioch; the Abyssinians (Ethiopians) who received their faith from Egyptian Alexandria developed their own forms of the Coptic Rite.

The bishops who presided over these major families of churches were called "patriarchs," literally "father-rulers." The territories over which they ruled as patriarchs were called, none too surprisingly, patriarchates. Definite sanction for the entire history of that development was given firm and distinct approval at that first Great Council, Nicaea, 325. And again in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople.

It is truly said that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." Not even in the realm of ecclesiology. The very patriarchal structure that had grown up facilitating the spread of Christianity would very shortly also facilitate the spread of heresy - a heresy that tore the very fabric of the Church so viciously that its basic form remains even to this day, though under another name. Arianism. And its daughters.

That same patriarchal structure also preserved the Church against the assaults of that heresy, and permitted it to maintain intact the doctrines handed down from the Apostles - that doctrine Catholics today still refer to as "The Deposit of Faith."

Courtesy of Catholic Information Network (CIN)

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