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==Overview==
Whether the Western Rite will survive in the Orthodox Church and be accepted by the majority who follow the Byzantine Rite remains yet to be seen. In the meantime, the Byzantine Rite bishops [[bishop]]s who oversee Western Rite parishes—and many who oversee no Western Rite parishes—continue to declare their Western flocks to be Orthodox Christians and regard them as fully in communion with the rest of the Church.
On the other hand, some Byzantine Rite Orthodox Christians do not recognize the Orthodoxy of those in the Western Rite (despite their being under the jurisdiction of Byzantine Rite bishops with whom they themselves are in communion), and will not attend the [[Eucharist]] at Western Rite parishes, declaring them to be "Roman Catholics," "[[schism]]atics," or "reverse [[Uniates]]." However, no Orthodox [[parish ]] may deny the Eucharist to visiting faithful of the canonical Western Rite, regardless of their feelings about the concept of Western Rite Orthodoxy. As yet, there are no schisms within the episcopacy of the Orthodox Church regarding the issue of Western Rite parishes.
==Byzantine only==
Some argue that there is only the Byzantine liturgical tradition can be viable within the Church. The argument's major weakness of this argument is that it ignores the wide liturgical variety characteristic of the first millennium of the Church's history. Many Orthodox Christians currently boast of the Church's liturgical homogeneity, claiming that, no matter where one might go in the Orthodox world, the [[liturgy ]] will be familiar, even if it's in another language. However, their first millennium counterparts would have been incapable of making such a claim—even if only the Eastern liturgical tradition were taken into account. It wasn't until the 13th century that the tradition of the Great Church (i.e., [[Hagia Sophia (Constantinople)|Hagia Sophia]]) became normative for the whole of Orthodoxy.
==Divisiveness==
In contrast to this claim, others note that it is not a dogmatic principle of the Church that liturgical traditions can neither be revived nor created. After all, there are whole services even within the Byzantine Rite which are not universally practiced (e.g., the [[molieben]]), so they must have been invented somewhere along the way rather than being part of the [[typikon]] when it first came into the form we now know it. Even then, the rites being used by Western Rite Orthodox Christians are not new, but mainly predate the [[Great Schism]].
Fr. John Shaw of ROCOR also argues the little-known Liturgy of St. Peter, a [[liturgy ]] identical to that of the Byzantine rite with the ancient Gregorian canon in its place, never fell out of use within Orthodoxy. The Old Believers and others celebrated this, explicitly endorsing the validity of the Western canon. At present, the historicity of this assertion is not universally accepted.
Further, the now fairly well-known [[Liturgy of St. James]] once fell out of use throughout most of the Church and has now been revived in many places to be celebrated on [[October 23]].
[[Category:Western Rite]]
