ii6 ANDREW J. SHIPMAN MEMORIAL 



principal church (chiesa madrice), or an eiimerios, or ordi- 

 nary parish priest, or assistant clergyman. All priests are 

 called Papas, answering to our "Reverend" or "Father." The 

 Greek priests of Italy are required to keep more closely to the 

 forms and usages of the Greek rite than the Greek Catholic 

 priests of Galicia and Hungary who use the Slavonic liturgy. 

 The Italian Greek priests are not allowed to be shaven, but are 

 required to wear beards, like their brethren of the Orthodox 

 church, to distinguish them from the Roman clergy, and they 

 all use the distinctive dress of the Greek church. They all 

 wear the camilaiio, or Greek biretta, and the flowing Greek 

 cassock, while the Ruthenian Greek Catholic priests are in 

 most cases shaven and wear the Roman cassock and a curious 

 biretta, resembling a Greek bishop's mitre, but which is neither 

 Greek nor Roman in form. 



The language of the liturgy is the ancient Greek, as used 

 in Constantinople, Athens and the East. The pronuncia- 

 tion of this Greek is not what we have been taught in the 

 schools and colleges of America. It is neither "continental" 

 nor "Erasmian." The Greek of the Mass and religious rite is 

 pronounced exactly as the modern Greek of Athens is. A 

 Greek priest in Rome or Sicily will utter the words of the 

 Holy Liturgy with the same pronunciation as a Greek priest 

 in Athens, Constantinople or Jerusalem. The only differences 

 in the words of the Mass are that at the Great Synapte the 

 Greek Catholics pray "for our Supreme Pontiff, the Pope of 

 Rome," while those of Athens pray for the Synod and its bish- 

 ops, and at Constantinople for the Patriarch and his bishops. 



In the article on the Greek Ruthenian Church, I have de- 

 scribed the rites of the Greek Church, and they are substantially 

 the same in Italy and Sicily. I was struck by the fact that the 

 Italian singing of the Greek of the Mass seemed to me to be 

 finer and fuller than that of the Greeks of Greece and Con- 

 stantinople in their services. I was told that the Greeks of the 

 East have never sung well like the Russians and Italians, be- 

 cause they were so long under Turkish rule and feared to let 

 their voices out harmoniously in Christian worship, and this 

 continuing for centuries had produced the muffled nasal form 

 of singing so often heard in the Greek churches of Greece and 

 Turkey. One can easily hear it in the Greek Orthodox Church 

 of the Holy Trinity in East 72nd Street, in New York City, 



