Fr. Mario Alexis Portella: The Eastern Contribution to the Universal Church

“And they conversed there in the church a whole year: and they taught a great multitude, so that at Antioch the disciples were first named Christians” (Acts 11:26).

On May 14, in his “Address to Participants in the Jubilee of Oriental Churches,” Pope Leo XIV not only praised “the unique spiritual and sapiential traditions that they preserve, and for all that they have to say to us about the Christian life, synodality, and the liturgy,” he also highlighted how the Oriental Churches have “a unique and privileged role as the original setting where the Church was born.”

The term “Eastern” or “Oriental” often is interpreted to refer to the churches that grew out of the liturgy and traditions of the ancient Church of Constantinople (the Byzantine Church), capital of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, as well as those churches that formed in communities from present-day Egypt through Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, and India. While our Christian faith vis-à-vis the Catholic Church flourished and developed in the West, the doctrinal and juridical structure as we know it today emanated from the East. …

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