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==History==
The earliest restored Western-rite communities (beginning with the work of Dr Julian Joseph Overbeck) were originally hostile to their antecedent heterodox bodies, due to their long-standing estrangement from Orthodoxy. By the time Overbeck began his famous petition to the Russian Synod, the Anglican establishment was horrified at the scheme; Overbeck notes that the authorities busied themselves "as with a great army," when the petitioners numbered only a few dozen. Overbeck's stated goal was to see a restoration of the various national Orthodox Churches in the West. Thus, we could label Overbeck without exaggeration as ''catastrophist''. As Overbeck's position was to see the Western Christian communions overtaken by Orthodoxy, wishing nothing but their conversion, by the end of the 19th century, it is a given that we would eventually see by the 20th century a Western-rite following develop within the atmosphere of the Orthodox Traditionalists.
By 1895, the [[Patriarchate of Constantinople]] recognized this developing opportunity for Orthodoxy in the West and responded to Pope Leo XIII in the sharpest tones concerning the possibility of union: "With these and such facts in view, the peoples of the West, becoming gradually civilized by the diffusion of letters, began to protest against innovations, and to demand (as was done in the fifteenth century at the Councils of Constance and Basle) the return to the ecclesiastical constitution of the first centuries, to which, by the grace of God, the orthodox Churches throughout the East and North, which alone now form the one holy, catholic and apostolic Church of Christ, the pillar and ground of the truth, remain, and will always remain, faithful. The same was done in the seventeenth century by the learned Gallican theologians, and in the eighteenth by the bishops of Germany; and in this present century of science and criticism, the Christian conscience rose up in one body in the year 1870, in the persons of the celebrated clerics and theologians of Germany, on account of the novel dogma of the infallibility of the Popes, issued by the Vatican Council, a consequence of which rising is seen in the formation of the separate religious communities of the Old Catholics, who, having disowned the papacy, are quite independent of it." ([http://http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/encyc_1895.aspx|1895 Encyclical to Pope Leo XIII on Reunion.])
Between the diversity found among Old Catholics, a sudden interest in the Moscow Patriarchate to found Western-rite parishes (the motivations for this were at the time unclear) beginning with Bp Dosistheus (Ivanchenko) in 1962, and the above developments, the two streams of thought-- developmental and catastrophic-- mentioned above began to color the philosophy of the Western-rite communities in America and Europe. By 1961, the Basilian Order was under the Antiochian Dioceses in America, and a number of Old Catholic bodies and disaffected Roman Catholics had joined the [[Moscow Patriarchate]].
==Ecumenism and the Western Rite==
