Under the Melkite-Catholic Patriarch, His Beatitude Maximos V, is situated in the Middle-East, now also in Africa, Europe, the Americas, Australia.
The number of Melkite Catholics is approximately one million.
Their native tongue is Arabic.
Their liturgical language is chiefly Arabic, partly Greek, and the vernacular.
The Melkite Catholic Church includes the patriarchal archdiocese, 14 archdioceses and dioceses, one diocese (USA 75,000 Catholics). The Catholics in the Near-East are mostly Catholics of the Eastern Rites.

Little Church History     

The Catholic Church, established by Christ in Palestine, spread to other regions of the world.
In the Catholic Church today there are still five Major Rites:

• In the West:

The Latin Rite of Rome

• In the East:

the Byzantine Rite of Constantinople

the Coptic Rite of Alexandria

the Syrian Rite of Antioch

the Armenian Rite of Cilicia

The universality of the Church, like the heart of God, embraces all men accepting their language and cultures and allowing them to express their Faith in diversity of rites.
Unity and Diversity
"Unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and Charity in all things" St. Augustine

Rite   

A rite is the manner of expressing one's faith liturgically. It is the manner in which liturgical worship is carried out.
Different rites have evolved in the course of the Church History, giving to liturgical worship form and usages peculiar and proper to the nature of worship itself and to the culture of the faithful in various circumstances of time and place.
Thus, there has been development since apostolic times in prayers and the ceremonies of the Divine Liturgy (the Mass), the administration of the Sacraments, the recitation of the Divine Office. Many of the Eastern Rites have maintained and preserved the dignity and beauty of the primitive Church.

The Byzantine Rite   

This rite was proper to the Church of Constantinople. It is based on the Rite of St. James of Jerusalem and the Churches of Antioch and reformed by St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom.
The byzantine rite is used in the Greek, Melkite, Russian, Ruthenian and Ukrainian liturgies and also by the Rumanians, White-Russians, Albanians, Ungarians, Georgians, Slaves, Bulgarians and other racial groupings
. It is now used by the majority of the Eastern Catholics and by the Eastern Orthodox Church which is not in union with Rome.
After the Roman Rite, it is the largest Rite in Christendom.

Language  

Greek, the language of Constantinople was the tongue for all Catholics for the first two or three hundred years after the Apostles. Latin was later adopted as the official language of the Roman Rite. The policy of the Byzantine was to use the language of the country itself.

To be Translated

La Divne Liturgie    

Le grec, la langue de Constantinople, était la langue de tous les catholiques pour les premiers deux ou trois cents ans après les Apôtres.
Plus tard, le latin fut adopté comme langue officielle par le rite latin de Rome. La politique du rite byzantin fut d'utiliser la langue du pays lui-même.

L’ Église Melchite¹ Catholique est la branche de l’Église Byzantine répandue en Orient. Elle compte actuellement 2 000 000 fidèles dont 700 000 en Syrie, au Liban, en Egypte, en Palestine, en Jordanie en Iraq, et 1 350 000 émigrés surtout dans le Nouveau-Monde. En tant que catholique, elle reconnaît l’autorité du Souverain Pontife de Rome, mais elle relève, pour ce qui regarde la liturgie, la discipline et le gouvernement intérieur, de l’autorité d’un Patriarche qui porte le titre de Patriarche d’Antioche et de tout l’Orient, d’Alexandrie et de Jérusalem. La hiérarchie de l’Église Melchite compte environ un trentaine d’évêques résidentiels dans une trentaine de diocèses, de nombreux prêtres entre clergé séculier et régulier et mariés, desservant plus de 400 paroisses ou s’occupant de diverses œuvres.

L’ Église Melkite est l’héritière légitime du Siège Apostolique d’Antioche fondé par saint Pierre. L’épithète de melchite, qui signifie royaliste lui a été donnée au VI^e siècle par les Monophysites d’Égypte au moment des dissensions christologiques qui divisèrent l’Orient après le Concile de Chalcédoine. Ce sobriquet devait stigmatiser, aux yeux des hérétiques, sa foi catholique défendue par l’empereur de Byzance.

La liturgie primitive de l’Église Melkite est celle d’Antioche enrichie par des apports de Césarée de Cappadoce, puis élaborée définitivement par Byzance, elle s est appelée byzantine. Les Patriarcats melkites l’adoptèrent progressivement assez tôt.

La liturgie byzantine est actuellement pratiquée par presque 200 millions de fidèles répandus surtout dans le monde hellénique et slave. La langue en usage dans cette liturgie, en général la langue populaire, et quelques rares particularités rituelles divisent l’Église byzantine en plusieurs Églises nationales, russe, roumaine, ukrainienne, hellène, melkite, dans lesquelles nous trouvons toujours deux branches, l’une catholique et unie à Rome l’autre orthodoxe ou schismatique et ne reconnaissant pas l’autorité du Souverain Pontife de Rome.

Les différences notables se rencontrent dans la célébration de la messe et l’administration des sacrements entre l’Église Latine et l’Église Byzantine. Nous nous contenterons de celles qui regardent la Sainte Messe :

• 1. Usage du pain fermenté. -

• 2. Absence de couleurs liturgiques déterminées. -

• 3. Communion des fidèles sous les Deux Espèces. -

• 4. Grande part du diacre dans le service divin. -

• 5. Participation constante des fidèles à la Liturgie, de sorte que la Messe est un dialogue entre le prêtre ou le diacre et    l’assistance.

La Divine Liturgie débute par la préparation de la matière du sacrifice, le pain et le vin, sur un autel latéral, appelé prothèse. La messe proprement dite comprend deux parties principales, la liturgie des catéchumènes et celle des fidèles. La première, ainsi nommée parce que dans les premiers siècles de l’Église, les catéchumènes et les pénitents pouvaient y assister avec les fidèles, va jusqu’à l’oblation exclusivement. La seconde, à laquelle ne participaient que les baptisés admis à la communion, va de l’oblation à la fin. La liturgie des catéchumènes commence par des exhortations du diacre à prier pour diverses intentions, la paix du monde, le salut des âmes, l’évêque du lieu, les gouvernants, les voyageurs, les malades, etc. Elle se termine par des antiennes tirées de la Sainte Écriture. Suivent la procession avec le livre des Évangiles, le chant du propre du jour, l’Épître, l’Évangile, puis de nouveau, des exhortations diaconales.  

La liturgie des fidèles comprend l’oblation ou offertoire, l’anaphore ou Canon et la communion. L’oblation se compose d’une double prière pour les fidèles, du chant du Chéroubikon ou offertoire, de la procession des oblats transportés solennellement de la prothèse à l’autel, d’une seconde offrande du pain et du vin déposés sur l’autel, de diverses demandes formulées par le diacre ; elle se termine par le baiser de paix et le symbole.

L’anaphore comprend : la préface, l’Aghios ou le Sanctus, la Consécration, l’Anamnèse, l’offrande du Corps et du Sang du Seigneur, l’Épiclèse, la mémoire des Saints, des vivants et des morts. Elle se termine par quelques prières et la réitération des demandes déjà formulées par le diacre avant la Consécration, enfin l’Oraison dominicale.  

La Communion est annoncée par l’élévation, la fraction de l’Hostie dont une parcelle détachée est unie au Précieux Sang. Pendant le chant du kinonikon, chant de communion, les ministres sacrés récitent les prières préparatoires et communient. Les Saints Mystères sont ensuite distribués aux fidèles. Suivent les prières d’action de grâces et le renvoi du peuple.
¹ Melchite ou Melkite

Historical introduction   

Here are some extracts taken at length from a synthesis made by Msgr. Joseph Nasrallah, our Exarch in Paris, of his « HISTOIRE de L'EGLISE MELCHITE des ORIGINES à NOS JOURS » (History of the Melkite Church from its Origins to the Present Day), published in Le Lien.

Unlike the other oriental churches, Catholic or Orthodox, the Melkite Church is not a national church. In the canonical acceptation of the word it is a particular Church, spread throughout the Arab Middle East and throughout a diaspora of ever increasing extent. It is the legitimate heir of the three apostolic sees of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Its origins are inextricably bound up with the preaching of the Gospel in the Greco-Roman world of the Eastern Mediterranean and with the extension of Christianity beyond the limits of the Empire. The setting up of the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, the first two at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) and the third at Chalcedon (451 A.D.), gave it its form and made of it a territorial and juridical entity.

The Melkite Church owes its character as a particular church to two loyalties, one to the Empire of Byzantium and the other to the first seven ecumenical councils. However, it was only towards the end of the fifth century that it took the name of Melkite. This appellation, which was invented by its Monophysite detractors to stigmatize its fidelity to Marcian the Emperor (=malka in Syriac) and to the council which he had called at Chalcedon, is the distinguishing label marking its orthodoxy in relation to the cattolica.

In our day, sociologically speaking the Melkite Church offers an astonishing ethnic homogeneity; its patriarch, its episcopate, its clergy both regular and secular, its faithful, are mostly Arabic speaking.

With the Arabo-lslamic conquest of the seventh century, the world of the Melkite patriarchates passed under non-Christian domination; Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem were part of the Islamic world up to and including the Ottoman domination, which started in 1516. With rare exceptions during the Mameluke rule, the Christians did not undergo persecution so much as a regime of vexation and subjection; they were now dhimmis or protected people. They assumed with resignation and courage their new role as witnesses to Christ in the territory of Islam. As they were no longer able to play a political role, the Melkites, like the Jacobites and Nestorians, turned towards the liberal professions, especially medicine, and were the artisans of the translation into Arabic of the philosophical, medical and scientific heritage of ancient Greece.

The Byzantine reconquest of Antioch lasted no more than a century, from 960 to 1085 A.D. It had as consequence the Byzantinization of the liturgy of the three patriarchates, and the adaptation of the liturgical usage and customs of the imperial city was more or less accomplished at Antioch by the end of the thirteenth Century.

But there was something which not even the halo surrounding the ecumenical throne of Constantinople had been able to do, and that was the dragging of the Melkite Church into schism; now, however, the Crusaders prepared the way for it. What happened was that Latin patriarchs and bishops replaced the Melkite hierarchy everywhere except at Alexandria. The local Church was forced to submit to a foreign Church. A kind of estrangement grew up between the two, without the former however actually breaking off its relations with Rome.

The reign of the Mamelukes from 1250 to 1516 not only put an end to the existence of Frankish possessions in the East, but was itself a crucial period for the Christian communities; persecutions, destruction and massacres were their almost daily lot. It was during the reign of these slaves invested with authority that the number of Christians went sharply down, with whole regions either Islamized or emptied of their population. However, the faithful few held on to their mission, which took on more and more a character of witness and of fidelity to Christ. Confessors and martyrs were not lacking.

The Ottoman conquest ( 1 516 to 1 91 8) was no more clement, at least until the seventeenth century. For a long time now, Christians had no longer been considered as «protected» persons but were viewed as no better than infidels. The Pashas were under no restraint in their dealings with this category under their administration, a category which had no legal means of protest.

Now all the East was under one authority alone, that of the Sultan, who knew how to get the most out of the situation. Constantinople became not only the political capital of an immense empire, but also the religious capital of the East, in the same way as Rome was of the West. The Ecumenical Patriarch was now given complete authority over the members of the Melkite hierarchy. Their confirmation and sometimes even their election depended on the Phanar. The hierarchies of Alexandria and Jerusalem were in consequence completely Hellenized, and from 1534 down to the present day their episcopal charges have been given to Greeks. So it was that the two patriarchates cut themselves off from the cattolica to embrace schism. Hellenism had no hold on Antioch, whose patriarchs were chosen from among the native clergy, and for the most part maintained some links with 14 Rome. Basically, the Patriarchate never faltered in its belief, even when one or other of its chief hierarchs happened to be more favorable to Constantinople than to Rome. A Church is formed of more than its head; it is composed also of bishops, clergy and people. The faithful bear within themselves a sense of the truth, a sure instinct which allows them to recognize it. Simply because Pope Honorius leaned towards monothelitism, has anyone ever seriously deduced that the Church of the West actually embraced this heresy?

The failure of the Union attempted at Florence served as a lesson for Rome. The establishment of formal communion with an oriental Church would have to be brought about by work at the base and not at the summit. During an early stage, various missionaries, including Jesuits, Capuchins, Carmelites and Franciscans, put themselves at the disposition of the local hierarchy and worked in co-operation with it. Pastors who were not in formal communion with Rome encouraged their flocks to turn to the missionaries. The people felt the need for a deeper understanding of the traditional faith which they followed despite one thousand years of repression. They hoped to gain this from a clergy more instructed than their own. On both sides, the feeling was that there was one and the same faith which they shared. However, there was a fraction of the population which felt drawn by the high reputation of western culture and took over the Latin contribution in its entirety.

So it was that after some decades there appeared a new way of conceiving the traditional faith. The behavior of these new «Catholics» was viewed as treason by the group of those attached to their past and as a 15 deformation of their ancestral law. Consequently, communion in one faith with the cattolica, which had never ceased to flourish in the Patriarchate of Antioch, was called into question and two different conceptions of it made their appearance. The Antiochean identity became lost. one fraction of the faithful leaned towards Byzantium and became more Constantinopolitan than Antiochean, while the other fraction tended towards Rome, with a relationship that was Roman rather than faithful to the belief of the local Church The result was that at the death of Patriarch Athanasius in 1724, a double lineage of patriarchs came into existence, one Orthodox and the other Catholic. Both lines have lasted down to the present day.

1724 was indeed a fateful year; from now on there were two parallel hierarchies, two sister communities, riven apart under the complacent eye of the Turks, who granted the patriarchal and episcopal sees to those who offered them the most. Both sides had their martyrs and confessors. Henceforth, the two Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, followed two divergent ways and two different destinies.

The first one, the one which we are to talk about, namely the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, pushed on with its own internal organization. New monastic orders were founded and a clergy educated in Rome taught in the newly founded schools. A seminary was opened in Aïn Traz in 1811. Despite the difficulties of the period of growth, which lasted until the end of the eighteenth century, due above all to antagonisms between the new monastic congregations, the Melkite Church could stand on its own feet; local Church councils endowed it with a solid organization and so it extended and developed. Then in the nineteenth century, Providence provided it with two great patriarchs, Maximos Mazioum (1833 to 1855), and Gregory Joseph Sayour (1864 to 1897).

Three years after his election, Mazloum put the finishing touches to the canonical legislation of his Church, confirmed at the Councils of Aïn Traz in 1835 and of Jerusalem in 1849. He extended his care to the Patriarchate of Alexandria, for in their efforts to flee persecution at the hands of the Orthodox, many Catholics from Syria and Lebanon had emigrated to Egypt. Mazloum consecrated a bishop for them, sent them priests and provided the new parishes with churches and charitable foundations, and did as much for the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. But Mazloum is above all famous for having obtained from the Sultan recognition of the complete independence of his Church from both the civil and ecclesiastical points of view, in the year 1848.

The long patriarchal reign of Gregory Joseph was both glorious and fertile. For thirty-three years, balancing his actions against their possible consequences on the capital work of the union of the Churches, he strove for the application of his great plan for the restoration of his Church. He wished for this to be done according to the pure oriental tradition and this explains his opposition to Vatican I for its declaration of the dogmas of the Primacy and Infallibility of the Pope in the meaning given them by the majority of the Fathers present, as he considered declaration of these dogmas to be inopportune. He struggled against Protestantism, which was penetrating the area in force, by founding the patriarchal colleges of Beirut in 1865 and of Damascus in 1875. In 1866 he re-opened the seminary of Aïn Traz, but most important of all it was he who was behind the founding of the seminary of St. Anne of Jerusalem in 1882. He took a most important part in the Eucharistic Congress of Jerusalem in 1893. His suggestions had in addition an important influence on the elaboration of the encyclical Orientalium Dignit as a veritable charter for the oriental Churches by which Pope Leo XIII ordered the strictest respect for the rights of the patriarchs and for the oriental discipline, correcting on several points the spirit of the majority of the Latin missionaries.

We all remember the outstanding personality of Maximos IV (1947-1967) and his action at Vatican II. It has been truly said of him that he was one of the Fathers who made the Council, to which he imparted many of the orientations that it took. Perhaps, when one considers the small number of the faithful of his Church, his audacity may appear to have bordered on temerity. But he was strongly aware that he was speaking on behalf of the « absent brother », the great Orthodox Church, which counts no less than two hundred million faithful. He drew his force and his effectiveness from the conception which he had of his Church as a bridge between Rome and Orthodoxy. Since his election to the Patriarchate on November 22, 1967, his successor, His Beatitude Maximos V Hakim, the present head of the Melkite Church, has firmly followed the way traced by his predecessors, while paying particular attention to the problem of the Diaspora of his Church; for in fact most of its members live outside the limits imposed on our Patriarchate.

Let us just add two remarks to what Msgr. Nasrallah has to say:

- The first concerns the part played by our Melkite-Greek Catholic faithful in the Arabic Renaissance of the nineteenth century. «The Melkites», says Archimandrite Ignatius Dick, in his recent article Melkite-Grecs-Catholicques: Identité et Mission, «took part during the nineteenth century in the Arab cultural and national renaissance. The principal Melkite Catholic writers were Nassif Al Yaziji and his son Ibrahim, as well as the great poet Khalil Moutran, all of the highest class. The founder of Al-Ahram, the most important newspaper of Cairo, was also a Melkite, Philip Takla...».

- The second remark concerns two very urgent preoccupations of our community and particularly of our Patriarch, His Beatitude Maximos V, ever since his election in November 1967, namely the clergy and the emigrants.

1. From the time of his election, Maximos V has had to confront the problem of the senior seminary St. Anne of Jerusalem, closed to our Arab students by the Israeli occupation of the Holy City. The senior seminarists were received temporarily in the house of the Paulist Fathers at Harissa and then in the center at Zouk, until the major project of Rabweh was finished and inaugurated in 1977. Further, as priestly vocations were more numerous in Syria than in Lebanon, in 1970 His Beatitude founded the Junior Seminary of Damascus, confided first to the Reverend Father Elias Sargi and then to the Paulist Fathers of Harissa.

2. Noticing that the emigration of our faithful towards more clement skies than ours was increasing steadily, H.B. Maximos V consecrated long periods during our yearly synods to the study of the problem of our faithful abroad, and several reports were sent to the Holy See on the subject. These received sympathetic consideration and the Holy Father, responsive to our desires and to the directives of the councils, accepted the nomination of Archbishop Spiridon Mattar as Eparch of Bazil eight years ago and of Archbishop Michael Hakim for Canada four years ago. Consequently we already have three bishoprics for our emigrants, that of the United States, older than the others, having been confided from 1970 to Archbishop Joseph Tawil. His Beatitude the Patriarch and the Holy Synod are now turning their gaze to the rest of Latin America, to Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela, where Archbishop Peter Rati has just completed his apostolic visitation, and towards Australia, where Archbishop John Mansour made an apostolic visitation in October 1985.

TO BE TRANSLATED

 General Statistics (approximate figures)
Référence : Almanach Melkite grec catholique 1997   

EN ORIENT :

C'est le titre de l'Évêque qui, seulement au deuxième rang après le Pape Benoît XVI, a le plus haut rang dans la hiérarchie de juridiction. Il est le titulaire de l'un des Sièges Apostoliques.

Soumis seulement au Pape, un Patriarche de rite oriental est le chef de la hiérarchie et des fidèles appartement à ce rite à travers le monde.

Les sièges patriarcaux sont dénommés ainsi à cause de leurs statuts spéciaux et de leur dignité dans l'histoire de l'Église, et à cause de leur fondement Apostolique:

• Rome et Antioche par saint Pierre
• Constantinople par saint André
• Alexandrie par saint Marc
• Jérusalem par saint Jacques et par le Christ lui-mème

Sa Sainteté le Pape Benoît XVI, l'Évêque de Rome, est le Patriarche de l'Occident pour tous les fidèles du rite latin de Rome.

Sa Béatitude Gregorios III Laham est le Patriarche d'Antioche et de tout l'Orient, d'Alexandrie et de Jérusalem pour tous les melkites grecs catholiques.

Son Église travaille à un siècle oecuménique comme un lien entre les catholiques occidentaux et les orthodoxes orientaux.

Sa Béatitude Gregorios III Laham
Patriarche d'Antioche et de tout l' Orient, d'Alexandrie et de Jérusalem
Chef spirituel de l'Eglise Patriarcale Melkite Grecque Catholique.

Le vingt-et-unième dans la lignée des Patriarches melkites grecs catholiques depuis 1724:

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