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Pope Leo XIV greets Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, during a meeting with participants in the Jubilee of the Eastern Churches in the Paul VI Audience Hall at the Vatican May 14, 2025. CNS photo/Vatican Media

Why We need the Eastern churches, in Pope Leo XIV's own words

Wednesday, June 18, 2025Faith

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Leo also emphasizes how the ascetic tradition leads to personal transformation in prayer. Eastern prayer uses icons to mediate the presence of Christ and prays especially by invoking his name in the Jesus Prayer.

"The Church needs you."

In the first week of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV spoke these words to members of the Eastern Catholic Churches gathered in Rome to celebrate the Jubilee. On June 2, he also honored an Eastern Catholic martyr, Blessed Iuliu Hossu, the Greek-Catholic Bishop of Cluj-Gherla. These providential encounters with the Christian East remind us of John Paul II's insistent cry in "Ut Unum Sint": "the Church must breathe with her two lungs!" Pope Leo's address for the Eastern Catholic Jubilee points to a few ways the Western lung can find inspiration for its Eastern counterpart.

1. Liturgy

First, Leo points us to the most obvious point of influence: the beauty of Eastern Catholic liturgies, which have preserved their transcendent mystery.

He comments, "The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense! We have a great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God's majesty embraces our human frailty!"

In a world that has turned away from God, the path back is not through mundane, human-centered experiences. The West needs re-enchantment, and the Christian East offers needed witness to the way Christian liturgy can awaken the heart and imagination.

2. Asceticism

Just as the Eastern Churches have preserved their ancient liturgies, they have also maintained traditional forms of asceticism -- the penance and self-discipline that have shaped Christian conversion. Pope Leo also sees this as a way of overcoming the eclipse of God in Western culture:

"It is likewise important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting and weeping for one's own sins and for those of all humanity (penthos)! It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism."

Pope Leo succinctly summarizes the spiritual malaise of Western individualism, with God's presence obscured by the constant distractions of our culture, with its monetized distractions that serve our material comfort. The asceticism of the desert focuses on Christ, turning the mind and heart to him, and disciplines the body, rather than pampering it, so that it, too, may praise God. The Church in the West often caters to our secular, consumerist culture rather than offering a serious challenge through self-discipline.

3. Prayer

Leo also emphasizes how the ascetic tradition leads to personal transformation in prayer. Eastern prayer uses icons to mediate the presence of Christ and prays especially by invoking his name in the Jesus Prayer. The goal is divinization, finding peace through healing and transformation by grace, as Pope Leo highlights: "Your traditions of spirituality, ancient yet ever new, are medicinal. In them, the drama of human misery is combined with wonder at God's mercy, so that our sinfulness does not lead to despair, but opens us to accepting the gracious gift of becoming creatures who are healed, divinized and raised to the heights of Heaven." Here again, we find a broader horizon for prayer that draws one beyond a fixation on feeling and comfort.

4. Synodality

Finally, as the Church discerns a proper approach to synodality, an ancient practice of episcopal governance, Leo looks again to the East as a model. This synodality is not a democratic free-for-all that tries to reinvent the Church for a new age. Rather, it expresses the communion of the Church and the responsibility that bishops bear for the governance of the Church. Leo draws this out:

"Thank you, dear brothers and sisters of the East, the lands where Jesus, the Sun of Justice, dawned, for being 'lights in our world' (cf. Mt 5:14). Continue to be outstanding for your faith, hope and charity, and nothing else. May your Churches be exemplary, and may your pastors promote communion with integrity, especially in the Synods of Bishops, that they may be places of fraternity and authentic co-responsibility. Ensure transparency in the administration of goods and be signs of humble and complete dedication to the holy people of God, without regard for honors, worldly power or appearance."

Let us hope that in this area, as well as the others, the East can remain a model for genuine renewal in the Church.

A Recommendation

For anyone interested in learning more about the Eastern tradition of prayer, I recommend a new book, at once deep and accessible, by Dr. Alexander Harb, "The Kingdom of the Heart: Meditations from the Christian East" (Sophia Institute Press, 2024). I found in the book's third chapter, titled "The Heart," another important reason for engaging the Eastern Churches.

Their tradition helps counter our culture of distraction and superficiality by creating interior watchfulness:

"To be constantly on the lookout for sinful or distracting thoughts and impulses is called nepsis, or watchfulness. This concept is discussed by virtually all of the Eastern Fathers. ... Everything that we do makes an impression on our hearts, and therefore to be watchful, we must recognize the things that threaten the light of God there. So too, we have to know how to defend our hearts."

Harb references the liturgy often and draws extensively from the Eastern Fathers, especially those of the desert. Here's one example from St. Antony the Great:

"To guard the heart, Abba Antony would call out the name 'Jesus' continuously; then he would say it silently in his heart. Abba Antony would tell his disciples, 'The kingdom of Heaven is within you . . . . Thus living, let us keep guard carefully, and as it is written, 'keep our hearts with all watchfulness.'"

Growing in watchfulness will enable us to respond to the call of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: "Let us be attentive." To turn our attention back to the Lord, we would do well to look East, as Pope Leo has wisely recommended.