Orientale Lumen
St Benedict, Patron of Europe, was keenly aware of being heir to an Eastern tradition. He saw it as intrinsic to the treasure from which, in his Rule, he asked abbots to bring forth things old and new. In Orientale Lumen, Pope John Paul II submitted that ‘members of the Catholic Church of the Latin tradition must be fully acquainted with this treasure’. Drawing on the metaphor of Vyacheslav Ivanov, he insisted that the Church needs to breathe with both lungs, Eastern and Western, so to be rescued from asphyxiating provincialism and imprisonment in the immediate: ‘Today we often feel ourselves prisoners of the present. It is as though man had lost his perception of belonging to a history which precedes and follows him. This effort to situate oneself between the past and the future, with a grateful heart for the benefits received and for those expected, is offered by the Eastern Churches in particular, with a clearcut sense of continuity which takes the name of Tradition and of eschatological expectation.’ Are we now, in the Latin Church, breathing to capacity?