Eastern Catholic churches prepare to start Lent on Monday
St. John Paul II, Pope of the Catholic Church from 1978 until his death in 2005, once said “the Church must breathe with her two lungs.”
Those two lungs, the Eastern Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church, both contribute to the health and vitality of the Catholic Church as a whole.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help, an Eastern Catholic Church in Wheeling, W.Va., starts its Lenten season Monday, two days before the Roman Catholic churches do.
That’s one example of the things that make the churches unique.
The Rev. Jason Charron is pastor at both Our Lady of Perpetual Help and Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church in Carnegie. In describing what makes Eastern Catholicism special, he offered the analogy of universities. Every university, he said, has a strong suit. Some are known for their math and science curriculum; others are known for arts programs.
“As Eastern Catholics, we are part of that body of Christ which would, I guess, more easily associate with the artistic side as opposed to the scientific side,” he said. “We would identify more with, let’s say, the mystical side.”
Mysticism is what drew Charron to the Eastern Catholic Church. He originally went to seminary in the Roman Catholic Church, but when he went to Ukraine to teach English to seminarians, he was “gobsmacked by the beauty and faith of the people.”
Charron met his wife there – Eastern Catholic priests can marry while Roman Catholic priests cannot – and eventually joined the Ukrainian Catholic Church and went to seminary in Eastern Catholicism.
With that change, prayer no longer felt forced, he said.
“I wasn’t trying to call the birds to come near me. The flock of geese came and they lifted me up,” he said.
The Eastern Catholic Church shows respect and devotion to the faith’s martyrs. That, Charron said, is a central aspect of the faith.
“Without Good Friday, you can never have Easter Sunday,” he said.
“Christianity, for the first large chunk of its existence, was one of constant companionship with Jesus on the cross. It’s not through comfort and ease that’s going to convert the hardened hearts of sinners. It’s through our being able to love in the midst of sorrow that brings people to want to be with Jesus.”
The Eastern Catholic Lenten season takes its cue from that belief. Charron said the season is about “decreasing so that He may increase.” For the next 40 days starting Monday, the congregants at Our Lady of Perpetual Help will forgo meat and dairy. They’ll attend more services. They’ll be generous with their money. They’ll speak less and listen more.
The fasting isn’t about suffering, congregant Peter Leigh said, but honing one’s spirit.
“If we can’t control what we put in our mouths, we can’t control what comes out of it,” he said. “We don’t fast because we like to suffer; we fast because it sharpens us. It brings prayer and focus.”
The message Charron wants to offer the faithful this Lenten season is to understand the hard times so you can rejoice in the rebirth.
The Rev. Mark Brennan, bishop of the Wheeling-Charleston Diocese, said prayer, fasting and alms giving are pillars of the Roman Catholic Lenten season as well. The relationship between the churches allows for both to thrive.
“Catholic unity has always allowed for profound diversity,” Brennan said. “There’s no division between the rites or conflict on who is ‘more Catholic.'”
The difference, he said, is simply how faith is expressed.
Charron also celebrates that diversity. Bread, he said, has the same basic ingredients – water, flour, yeast, salt. Yet bread in Ukraine tastes different from bread in Germany, which tastes different from bread in Italy, which is different from bread in Lebanon.
Faith is much the same.
“And that’s the beauty of the Church,” he said. “It elevates and ennobles everything that’s good and true in a people.”