Rites of the Eastern Christian churches

• Byzantine rite¹ , which is the ritual of the majority of Eastern Catholics and the vast majority of Eastern Orthodox, excepting the Western rite.
  • Recensio Vulgata also called Nikonian. ² Nikonian refers to the reforms of Patriarch Nikon. ³
    • Covers roughly these churches:
      • Russian Orthodox Church
      • Bulgarian Orthodox Church
        • Bulgarians do not strictly follow Nikonian usage. The rubrics and Holy Week in particular tend to follow Constantinopolitan use. ⁴
    • A paper on the compilation of the Russian-Byzantine Catholic Menologion ⁵
  • Recensio Ruthena or Ruthenian recension. "Ruthenian" is an exonym that covers a broad swath of slavic peoples. ⁶
    • Used by the Ukrainian, Rusyn (Ruthenian), Slovak, Hungarian, and Croatian Greek Catholic Churches
    • The Ruthenian recension properly refers to the liturgical books produced in Rome from 1940-1973. ⁷ The project's main purpose was to purify the divine liturgy of Latinization. The Ruthenian liturgy was selected primarily from pre-Nikonian and Nikonian sources.
    • Communities that use the Ruthenian recension tend to follow Greek use more than Nikonian, especially in the para-liturgical accoutrements. ⁸
  • Italo-Greek is the typical name for the use of the Byzantine Italo-Greek-Albanian Church.

References