RITES IN THE UNITED STATES 229 



Greek Orthodox Church expects soon to have its own Greek 

 bishop, and the Servians and Rumanians also expect a bishop 

 to be appointed by their home authorities. 



III. — Maronite Rite 



The Maronite is one of the Syrian rites and has been closely 

 assimilated in the Church to the Roman Rite. Unlike the 

 Syro-Chaldean or the Syro-Catholic rites, for they all use the 

 Syriac language in the Mass and liturgy, it has not kept the 

 old forms intact, but has modelled itself more and more upon 

 the Roman Rite. Among all the Eastern rites which are now 

 in communion with the Holy See, it alone has no Schismatic 

 rite of corresponding form and language, but is wholly united 

 and Catholic, thereby differing also from the other Syrian 

 rites. The liturgical language is the ancient Syriac or Ara- 

 maic, and the Maronites, as well as all other rites who use 

 Syriac, take especial pride in the fact that they celebrate the 

 Mass in the very language which Christ spoke while He was 

 on earth, as evidenced by some fragments of His very words 

 still preserved in the Greek text of the Gospels (e.g., in Matt, 

 xxvii, 46, and Mark v, 41). The Syriac is a Semitic language 

 closely related to the Hebrew, and is sometimes called Ara- 

 maic from the Hebrew word Aram (Northern Syria). As the 

 use of Ancient Hebrew died out after the Babylonian captivity, 

 the Syriac or Aramaic took its place, very much as Italian has 

 supplanted Latin throughout the Italian peninsula. This was 

 substantially the situation at the time of Christ's teaching and 

 the foundation of the early Church. Syriac is now a dead 

 language, and in the Maronite service and liturgy bears the 

 same relation to the vernacular Arabic as the Latin in the 

 Roman Rite does to the modern languages of the people. It 

 is written with a peculiar alphabet, reads from right to left 

 like the Hebrew or Arabic languages, but its letters are unlike 

 the current alphabets of either of these languages. To sim- 

 plify the Maronite Missals. Breviary and other service books, 

 the vernacular Arabic is often employed for the rubrics and 

 for many of the best-known prayers ; it is written, not in 

 Arabic characters, but in Syriac, and this mingled language 

 and alphabet is called Karshuni. The Epistle, Gospel, Creed 



