Today we re-publish what is probably Dr Kania's most provocative commentary ever. "Breathing Deeply, With One Lung", was one of the first pieces that Dr Kania published after he returned to Australia from his studies in Uppsala, Sweden. The article has been published many times in various journals in Australia and overseas, and is probably the piece that Dr Kania is best known for. Recently it formed a major part of the educational material published in Australia for WYD 2008, regarding the structure of the Catholic Church. The article has become the point of reference for much that Dr Kania has written since on the Eastern Catholic Churches. As such it forms good background reading for a piece that Dr Kania has written for the forthcoming edition of The Tablet.

"The greatest test of a friendship is whether one person can reprove the other. All of us commit sins from time to time; and all of us try to blind ourselves to our sins, making excuses for ourselves, or pretending the sin did not even occur. At such times we need friends to open our eyes to the reality of our sins. Put yourself now in the position of the friend. Are you willing to open that person's eyes? Are you willing to expose the excuses as false? Are you prepared to risk that person's wrath, as wounded pride rises up in anger? Or do you prefer to blind yourself to your friend's faults, and so join a conspiracy of blindness?" (St. John Chrysostom, 1996, p. 48)

Examples of the geneeral ignorance of Latin Catholics of the universality and catholicity of their Church:

The year is 1977, the scene, a Catholic Boys School in Western Australia. A Year Six (11 years of age) class in Religious Education is coming to its close, as with another school day. To conclude the class, the teacher, a devout Latin Catholic asks her pupils to stand and say a final prayer. As the teacher initiates the sign of the cross, she stops the class and draws their attention to one of the boys, who in her words: "Has crossed himself the wrong way!" Bringing the child to the front she asks him to repeat his indiscretion. Seeing a chance to instruct the entire class further, the teacher poses the question: "Can any person in this class see what this silly boy is doing wrong?"

The 1997 publication by the Australian Catholic Bishops, "Eastern Catholics in Australia" is possibly still largely unknown to the vast majority of Catholics in Australia

To which 30 hands respond in answer. Grabbing the pupil by the right arm the teacher proceeds to correct the boy, who resists. Vigorous laughter ensues. Stating that she will not dismiss the class until the recalcitrant has shown to everyone that he has learnt his lesson the teacher forces the boy's hand open (which had been positioned with three fingers joined together, representing the Holy Trinity in Byzantine formulae), and draws on him the sign of the cross — left shoulder first then to the right. The boy in this story became in time the author of the article before you, and the sad event took place nearly two hundred years after the first Eastern Christian, a Ukrainian, came to Australia on the First Fleet in 1788. (See: Clark, 1962, p. 94)

As an adult I was exposed to even more examples of the lack of catholic understanding of the Church by many Roman Rite Catholics. A number of the more astonishing cases were to occur when I was completing my Doctoral degree in Sweden. On one occasion a Palestinian student came to Uppsala University in Sweden. Seeing the sign, Katolska kyrkan (Catholic Church), he entered. During a discussion about his Parish Priest and the Priest's wife, with a number of the parishioners, he was informed that he was not Catholic but Orthodox. Hearing the tail end of this discussion, I called the young man back. He told me: "All my life I have been Catholic but now they say I am not". The young Palestinian was indeed a Catholic, and informed me that he was from the city of Bethlehem! On another occasion in Uppsala a near riot ensued when I spoke about married clergy in the Catholic Church, to which two Spanish exchange students who were members of Opus Dei, declared: "We do not know what you are – but you can't be Catholic!"

All these anecdotes serve to introduce the underlying premise on which this paper is based: that like the Religious Education teacher in 1977 the majority of Catholics even today have little idea as to what it means to be a member of the Catholic Church. This gap in knowledge has had serious ramifications in the quality of Catholic Education that we continue to deliver our students, in that the perception we provide of the Catholic Church is too often of monochrome Catholicism.

This assumption was made still more painfully clear to me not only growing up as an Eastern Catholic in starkly Latin influenced Catholic Church schools, but also most recently after taking up a position as a university lecturer. On one occasion I delivered a lecture on the Eastern Churches. Afterward senior Church-going academics came up to me with amazed expressions on their faces wishing to know why they had never heard of the Eastern Catholic Churches seeing they had been educated at Catholic schools, and considered themselves to be practicing Catholics. One of these lecturers had even taught Religious Education for many years at the tertiary level. Further, while researching for this article I asked a librarian if she had any material on the Eastern Catholic Churches, to which she replied in inquisitive innocence, "These churches are east of where?" A more painful reaction occurred in one of my graduate classes when after discussing the Eastern Churches a student came up to me and stated that she felt that she had been robbed by the Catholic Church. In her words: "For forty years I have been a Catholic, but why has it been only now that someone has explained the grandeur of who we are?"

(i) Latin Church dominance:

These anecdotes beg the very serious question: If we sincerely seek as Catholics a unified Church – a unified Bride of Christ, then before we can accommodate our Orthodox brothers and sisters we must become more knowledgeable of that Eastern Church, which exists, already in complete union with the Holy See. If charity indeed begins at home, it becomes imperative that the Latin Church witnesses to the catholicity of the Church, by, as John Paul II has exhorted, showing "concretely, far more than in the past, how much she esteems and admires the Christian East and how essential she considers its contribution to the full realisation of the Church's universality" (John Paul II, 1995, §3). By so doing the Latin Church will be encouraging reunion with those of the Eastern Church who still remain separated from the Church Universal. As mature and intelligent Catholics we must heed Pius XI, who called for all to "be excited to a yet warmer love for the true Bride of Christ … bewitching beauty in the diversity of her rites" (Attwater, D., 1935, p. xii). By so doing perhaps the thirst for the mystical east, which has drawn so many Latin Catholics to Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, may be quenched by the rich and as yet untapped wealth of the Catholic East, which offers the religious mystery of the Orient within a Christian theological context.

On this latter theme, whereas I am in full accordance with the study of non-Christian religions in the Catholic School system, and seek to encourage this for it adds to the catholicity of the young mind, it is ironical that Catholic School students who graduate after twelve years of education, have received far more information on Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism (in Western Australia, at least) but have left without studying in any depth the eastern lung of the Catholic Church. I have found in this age of political correctness, that there seems to be no shortage of willingness for educators to become more informed about non-Christian Religions, yet perhaps out of fear or perhaps out of a distinct lack of interest there is no similar desire to learn about the Eastern Churches – Catholic or Orthodox.

The perception that the ancient Churches of the East have lost their relevance is far from the truth, as the Latin Church discovered at the Second Vatican Council. Of the 25 changes to the Latin liturgy which were implemented, over 20 of these were direct influences from the Eastern Catholic Churches who had maintained the ancient liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church. A number of the more important examples being: celebrating the liturgy in the vernacular, concelebration of the Eucharist, having communion under both species, as well as changing the rite of the Sacrament of Penance where the confessor and penitent sit face to face.

As an Eastern Catholic child, I can recall asking my father why I could not have wine with my Holy Communion when I went to Mass at the local Catholic School in the early 1970's. Asking my Irish primary school teacher the same question she informed me in no uncertain terms that I should not be ridiculous.

Tragically in an endeavour to appear more Western a number of the Eastern Catholic Churches have adopted within Western nations such as Australia, the Confessional booth as well as other Western innovations, such as kneeling during the Consecration, which in toto detract from Eastern theology. I shall deal in detail with all these matters in a later paper, entitled: Unity in Diversity or Procruste's Bed, only wishing now to make the reader aware of some of the inherent issues facing the Eastern Catholic Churches. Other contributions which the Eastern Catholic Churches have the potential to give the contemporary Church of the West lie in the area of the theological arguments behind a married clergy. The over-preoccupation in the Western Church and the quantity and nature of the discussions over a married clergy highlight the myopia of many in the Latin Church who continually discuss this issue by saying, "Married men cannot be priests in the Catholic Church". Such comments totally disregard the presence of the Eastern Catholic Churches. The correct formulation being, "In the Latin Church etc." or "In the Catholic Church of the West etc.". As a point of reference 95% of the 300 Ukrainian Catholic seminarians in Lviv, Ukraine, are married men.

Charles Hill, instructs the neophyte to take note that his studies have put him:

in touch with Eastern as well as Western forms of Christian life and theology. We in the West do not share the accent on mystery and divine transcendence, on the deification of the human being, on the role of the Spirit, on healing rather than fall that emerges from the worship and theology of the East. Western, Roman forms of worship, models of Church, doctrinal expressions and styles of theologising do not exhaust the totality of means of response to the sources of faith. Our map … demonstrates clearly the purchase that Eastern centers of Christian life had on Christendom in early centuries. It explains why the patriarchates and ecumenical councils were to be found east of the Italian peninsula. The schism of East and West in the eleventh century deprived us of this sense of diversity; we tend to think now in a monochrome Western fashion, and are the poorer for it". (Hill, 1995, p. 76)

Pope Benedict XVI

This work therefore has a twin dimension: to inform members of the Latin Church of the Catholic Church, and to inform the same group of the critical need of embracing the Eastern Churches so as to nurture a spirit of ecumenism. We must as Catholics show all the separated brethren that there is still a place in the Catholic Church for them, and that, in the case of the Orthodox, the vacuum which they have left behind, has not been arbitrarily filled and that their hoped for return has not been diminished either by our chauvinism or myopia. As Benedict XIV implored:

The Church does not require schismatics to abandon their rites when they return to Catholic unity, but only that they forswear and detest heresy. Its great desire is for the preservation, not the destruction, of different peoples – in short, that all may be Catholic rather than all become Latin. (Benedict XIV, 1775, §48)

Another intention of this paper is that it seeks to reveal the beauty of the Catholic Church to the reader and hopefully create in the hearts of the faithful a deeper and more aware love for Christ's Bride here on earth. It is in short a response to Pope John Paul II's call in Orientale Lumen: "I believe that one important way to grow in mutual understanding and unity consists precisely in improving our knowledge of one another". (John Paul II, 1995, § 47)

My comments although critical at times of the Latin Church do not seek to diminish the Latin Church, nor its members, but point out and explore a number of quite serious problems within the Latin Church, which have affected and still negatively influence the life of the entire Catholic Church as well as Her own self. I unequivocally revere the role that the Latin Church offers, as with all her sister Churches to the schema of the Church Universal. What I write in this paper is a summative echo of what many Popes for hundreds of years have exhorted. If the Catholic Church does not act on these many Papal letters and encyclicals, then criticism levelled at the Catholic Church as to Her only being ecumenical to the point of lip-service may be true.

This paper is written with a spirit of charity, which hopes to assist the entire Church in becoming more Catholic in its every day ecclesiastical and spiritual reality. To do this both East and West must enter into a new marriage, one of equality and respect, one where to borrow from Cardinal Newman, "heart speaks to heart" (Ker, 1988, p.719). As John Paul II has written:

Pope John Paul II

Since, in fact, we believe that the venerable and ancient tradition of the Eastern Churches is an integral part of the heritage of Christ's Church, the first need for Catholics is to be familiar with that tradition, so as to be nourished by it and to encourage the process of unity in the best way possible for each.

Our Eastern Catholic brothers and sisters are very conscious of being the living bearers of this tradition, together with our Orthodox brothers and sisters. The members of the Catholic Church of the Latin tradition must also be fully acquainted with this treasure and thus feel, with the Pope, a passionate longing that the full manifestation of the Church's catholicity be restored to the Church and to the world, expressed not by a single tradition, and still less by one community in opposition to the other; and that we too may be granted a full taste of the divinely revealed and undivided heritage of the universal Church which is preserved and grows in the life of the Churches of the East as in those of the West. (John Paul II, 1995, § 1)

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