The following Questionnaire Imago Mundi?Jesuites fin de si?cle was developed by two Spanish Jesuits for a volume on prominent Jesuits of the second millennium. Destined to be published in several languages, it has already appeared in Catalan and Spanish (?Robert Taft?, personal profile, published in Catalan in V. Valenti Gomez i Oliver, Josep M. Benitez i Riera, 31 jesuites es confessen Imago mundi (Biblioteca Universal 181, Barcelona: Editorial Empuries 2003) 249-285 (in Catalan); ibid. in Spanish in V. Valenti Gomez-Oliver y Josep M. Benitez, 31 jesuitas se confiesan Imago Mundi (Biblioteca Universal 181, Barcelona: Ediciones Peninsula 2003) 243-279.) Below is the English original (updated 2005).

Primarily?and in this order?I am a Catholic of the Russo-Byzantine tradition and a Jesuit priest-scholar specializing in the Christian East, most specifically its liturgical traditions. That defines both my being or personal identity, and my activity, though of course we are what we do?that is true at least of those like myself whose life is defined by what they do, and what they do is inseparable from what they are. I put things in this order because, unlike most Jesuits who have adopted the Russian rite, I consider my ecclesial tradition as superior?both per se and for me?to my membership in the Society of Jesus.
Some might be surprised, even disedified, that in defining myself I place the epithet ?Russian Catholic? first in importance, even before ?Jesuit.? If that is found disedifying, so be it. But I consider fundamental this principle I formulated early on, and which has guided my life as an Eastern Catholic priest: the traditions of the Byzantine rite in which I was ordained and to which I have tried to remain faithful in spirit and action, are an ecclesial reality superior to the more contingent customs of any monastery, religious order or congregation, including my own. When there is a conflict, it is the usages of the order that must cede. My experience of over forty years as an eastern-rite Jesuit has only confirmed the absolute rightness of my chosen route, and what had always been a guiding principle of my own double vocation as an eastern-rite member of a Latin religious order: whenever there is a conflict, real or apparent (i.e., so perceived by superiors), between the demands of my rite and those of the order, the rite must always take precedence.
Fortunately, the problem has never arisen for me in any substantive way, for times have changed since the early 1940s. The December 25, 1950, letter and decree of the Jesuit General John Baptist Janssens, Pro ramo orientali Societatis Iesu (Acta Romana Societatis Jesu XI:887-91), can be considered the ?Magna Charta? of eastern-rite Jesuits. It legislates explicitly that they are to live their rite in its integrity, and elements of the Jesuit Institute that by nature pertain to the Latin rite do not apply to them.
My later acquaintance with Melkite Catholic Archimandrite Orestes Kerame (1895-1983), a former Jesuit and major source of Melkite Catholic thought at Vatican II, only confirmed me in the rightness of this approach. Kerame, whose love for the Society of Jesus never lessened despite the painful choice he was forced to make, not only lived long enough to witness this greater openness in the Catholic Church and the Jesuit order; his life and thought prepared for it. I had the privilege of knowing Kerame personally. In long talks, this former Jesuit explained to me why he had felt obliged to leave in 1941 the order he obviously still loved. At that time there was no real room in a Latin religious order for one who wished to remain fully faithful to his eastern heritage, and Kerame chose the higher loyalty, unlike so many others who were prepared to abandon the ecclesial heritage of their birth for the traditions of a religious congregation, an ecclesial reality far more limited and less important in every way. The remarks of Archbishop Joseph Tawil on this separation from the Jesuits, despite their discretion, is sufficient commentary on how thing were at that time: ?Sa sortie de la Compagnie (1941) pour douloureuse qu?elle fut, etait providentielle car il n?aurait jamais pu y accomplir ce qu?il etait appele a realiser.? That he could not have accomplished what he did had he remained a Jesuit is far more a judgment on the Jesuits of that day than on Kerame. So I shall stand by my convictions regardless of whom they dismay.
As with every human being, my personal identity is inextricably bound up with my personal history. Although I entered the Jesuit novitiate on August 14, 1949, before I had ever heard of eastern liturgy or of the Missio Orientalis?popularly known as the ?Russian-rite branch??of the Society, it was in the Jesuit novitiate that I first learned of these two things that were to determine the future course of my life. I heard about the ?Liturgical Movement? from a fellow novice, and the word ?liturgy? entered my vocabulary for the first time. I acquired a daily missal, and later a Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, in Latin of course, which was to be my daily prayer for years. But I was still far from any professional interest in liturgy. It wasn?t even a hobby. I was just trying to worship God the way better informed people seemed to think was right.
My burning interest lay elsewhere. My mind has always been a tourist. As a child my favorite book was Richard Halliburton?s Book of Marvels, which recounted the wonders of the world from the Pyramids to the Kremlin, and from the Hagia Sophia to the cliff-hanging Monastery of Simonopetras on Mt. Athos. Other peoples, other ways have always beckoned me. In the novitiate with me was a novice from fabled Mesopotamia, our first vocation from the New England Province?s Baghdad Mission on the banks of the Tigris. He was a Catholic of the Syro-Antiochene rite. Curious as to what that meant, I read a book of essays entitled The Eastern Branches of the Catholic Church, then Donald Attwater?s The Eastern Catholic Church, and the Christian East became, in 1949, my first love and the door that opened onto the world of Christian liturgy which would later occupy my life.
My interest, begun as intellectual curiosity, soon became fueled by anger and embarrassment. I was embarrassed by the myopic vision of Christendom I had, and even more by my naive and sectarian view of the history and virtues of my own Church. I was indignant at how Eastern Christians in communion with the Catholic Church had been treated as second-class citizens or worse. I was enthralled with their long struggle for emancipation culminating in the 1893 International Eucharistic Congress in Jerusalem, of which the first important concrete result was Leo XIII?s constitution Orientalium dignitas the following year, rightly considered the Magna Carta of the Eastern Catholic Churches. Another result of this movement, the founding in 1917 of the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, was to have an importance for my life that of course I did not then realize.
In the meantime I had discovered Russia, a discovery that was to focus my nascent intellectual and ecumenical interests on a particular culture of the Christian East. In 1924, following the Treaty of Riga that determined the eastern border of the newly reestablished Poland after World War I, hundreds of thousands of Byzantine Catholics found themselves within the borders of Poland and in need of priests. Pope Pius XI requested help from the Jesuits, and thus was born the Missio Orientalis of the Society of Jesus, out of which originated the group of Russian-rite Jesuits I was later to join. Exiled by the Second World War and its aftermath, some Jesuits of this group came to Fordham University in 1949 to found there the Russian Center at a time when Russian studies were becoming popular in American universities. That is how I first heard of this apostolate tailor-made for my interests. A breathtaking ideal was conjured up by my adolescent romanticism: to open one?s mind and heart to this great and long-suffering people with its rich Christian culture, to work for the reconciliation of East and West. I immediately contacted the Russian-rite Jesuits at Fordham and began badgering my skeptical superiors to assign me to this mission.
For the next decade, more or less, as I plodded through the long years of Jesuit formation, I devoured Russian literature, philosophy, and history. Dostoevsky and Soloviev were a long way from my initial encounter with a novice from Baghdad, but in 1956 my interests came full circle when I was assigned to the Iraqi Mission. The world of the Christian East, hitherto known only through books, occasional visits to Orthodox churches, and poking through art shops in Boston?s Back Bay in search of icons, was to be my everyday life for three years.
After a nineteen-day voyage from Hoboken to Beirut, we bussed over the mountains and across the now famous Bekaa Valley to Damascus, where the caravans of the Nairn Desert Transport Company left in the cool of the afternoon for the trip across the Great Syrian Desert to Mesopotamia. This trans-desert passenger service established after World War I by the brothers Norman and Gerry Nairn, two New Zealand war veterans, had considerably reduced the risks of the long desert crossing to Baghdad. The huge, custom-built desert trailers pulled by diesel tractors were no Boeing, but they were a long step up from camels. Jets have long since replaced Nairn, I suppose, but the desert crossing will not be the same without it. About thirty miles east of Damascus the road came to an end, and from then on it was navigation by the stars as the caravan snaked 250 miles across the open desert to meet the road again at Rutba, the first desert outpost in Iraq, halfway to Baghdad.
Baghdad itself, fabled capital of Harun al-Rashid, city of the thousand-and-one nights, was a sure cure for romanticism. School began at Baghdad College in September, only to come to a sudden halt when riots over the Baghdad Pact following the Suez Crisis led to the closing of all schools. I used the enforced idleness to begin my initiation into the exotic liturgies of what Fortescue has dubbed ?the lesser Eastern Churches.? Feast or funeral, wedding or baptism summoned me. Notebook in hand, I would set out through the narrow, fetid alleys of the Christian Quarter in the old city to one of the several cathedrals piled helter-skelter in that small rabbit warren of a ghetto. There I would observe, try to locate in my translation just what the troop of deacons on the bema was wailing about, and carefully note down whatever bizarre curiosities caught my interest, whatever appeared to deviate from what was supposed to be going on according to my more-or-less reliable English version. I managed to get out of it my first, laboriously produced publication, a very short article in the December 1957 issue of Jesuit Missions magazine entitled ?From Detroit to Zakho,? describing the episcopal ordination of Qas Tuma Rais, former pastor in Detroit, as Chaldean Catholic Bishop of Zakho, in the Kurdish uplands north of Mosul, on the Khabur River that divides Iraq from Turkey.
Initially these forays were more the result of my curiosity about the ways of the East than of any interest in the science of liturgy. What finally propelled me toward liturgical studies was a chance but fateful encounter in the summer of 1957. The heat had come, school had ended, and once again the Nairn brothers jounced us across the desert to summer at the Maronite Seminary in Ghazir, a mountain village overlooking beautiful, then unspoiled Jouneih Bay, north of Beirut. It was there I first met Juan Mateos, S.J. (1917-2003). It is an awesome privilege to have had great teachers. Juan Mateos was one of the great teachers of liturgy in our times. In those days he was still a doctoral student doing research for his pioneering dissertation on nocturns and matins in the Chaldean tradition. It was he who formulated what I had already begun to perceive from my own experience: that liturgy is the soul of the Christian East. For one as passionately interested in the Christian East as I was, Mateos argued, what better door opened onto this world?
During that long lazy summer in Ghazir I spent the cooler mornings devouring French books, including my first book by Josef A. Jungmann, S.J. In those days Jesuit houses of the French tradition were not noted for their plumbing, but they had remarkably rich libraries, a tribute to the incomparable intellectual tradition that is France. On Sundays I went to the Maronite liturgy in the village church, tapped my foot to the beat of cymbals and the rhythmic Arabic chant, and watched.
The following fall Mateos was in Iraq doing research in the Syriac speaking Christian villages and monasteries around Mosul, and I took the train up along the Tigris to meet him for Christmas. We went out to the villages and monasteries to see the manuscripts he was studying, some of them manuscripts of the rite of Tikrit, a hitherto unknown Mesopotamian Jacobite tradition he had discovered through his research. Here was the work of the historian firsthand; it was like watching the potter at his wheel, and for the first time I saw the scholar?s craft as creative. The world of the historian is not just there for everyone to see. Someone must call it into being out of the amorphous mists of the past.
Mateos? chilling advice when asked what I should do to prepare for future studies in liturgy was to learn languages, then more languages, and finally more languages still. I never received better counsel. To rely on translations is to condemn oneself to viewing reality secondhand, refracted through the prism of an alien mind.
In May of 1959 I returned from the Middle East after a harrowing year of turmoil and civil strife which followed the revolution of July 14, 1958, and the disparate pieces of my jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place. I got a Master?s degree in Russian at Fordham University in NY, then began my theological studies at Weston College in 1960. In 1962, after years of relentless and unmitigating pressure on superiors, I was transferred from the Iraqi Mission to the Russian Mission, received the necessary change-of-rite papers from Rome on December 6, and was ordained deacon according to the Slav-Byzantine rite the same year and presbyter in 1963 by Bishop Nicholas Elko, the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Eparch of Pittsburgh. The die was cast, the road chosen, the attitudes in place. The rest was just a question of learning the ropes, which I did in Rome, living as an alumnus of the Russian College (1965-70) and studying under the direction of Juan Mateos at the Oriental Institute. After receiving my doctorate and being appointed professor there at the end of 1970, I went to Belgium for postdoctoral studies in oriental languages at the University of Louvain. I returned to the Orientale in 1973 and have been there ever since.
All of the above defines my being: who and what I am.
My activity or ministry?what I do to earn my bread?I do not consider simply a work or a ministry; it is an integral part of who I am. I would describe myself as an orientalist, working as a Jesuit priest-scholar in the service of the Churches?not Church, but Churches, a point I shall return to below.
My scholarship, as I conceive it, is first of all scholarship, which, ideally at least, is by definition free, non-confessional, historico-critical, and objective, in the service of nothing but the truth. It is also Jesuit scholarship. For thirty years I have spent most of my waking moments thinking, teaching, writing, or talking about liturgy. I have tried to do so as a Jesuit, i.e., as a servant of the Church. Many great liturgical scholars?Edmund Bishop, Anton Baumstark, Anselm Strittmatter OSB, Hieronymus Engberding OSB?had little or no effect on the liturgical praxis of the Church. But this was not the tradition of my Jesuit forebears like Jungmann or Hanssens, nor of my Jesuit teachers Ligier, Raes, and Mateos, whose scholarship was no less scholarly for the realization that it had a direct relation to the Church?s understanding and practice of worship. Nor was it the tradition of St. Ignatius, for whom every aspect of the Society of Jesus, including study and scholarship, was in the service of eloquentia, the spreading of the Good News of God?s Saving Word. So Jesuits are not scholars for personal creativity or the entertainment of their own brain cells, for the thrill of discovery or the pleasure of self-expression, of seeing their ideas propagated or their names in print.
Such scholarship is Jesuit for another important and often ignored reason. Nowadays leading and authoritative Jesuit documents speak of our work as primarily that of ?faith that does justice.? Unfortunately, this service of faith and justice is often conceived of exclusively in terms of the active apostolic and social ministries?preaching the Gospel to the poor and dispossessed, social action to combat systemic injustice by reforming unjust political, societal, and economic structures... But in addition to these essential and all-important ministries, there is another, more intellectual dimension to the struggle for justice, one that I see as an historical obligation incumbant in particular on the Jesuit intellectual in the service of the Eastern Churches.
For the Society of Jesus, specifically Jesuit missionaries to countries like Ethiopia and India during ?The Age of Discovery,? were responsible, perhaps unwittingly, for enormous injustices. In none of this am I judging anyone?s motives or good will. But good will, though far less common than the naive like to imagine, is the cheapest of all virtues, and cannot be used to excuse mistakes before the bar of history, but only at the Last Judgment. The policy of the Catholic Church toward the Christan East was a comedy of errors right up until modern times, when things began to change during the enlightened pontificate of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903). The self-glorification indulged in by our traditional Jesuit hagiographical histories pass lightly over such realities, of course, but the Society of Jesus is largely responsble for the diffidence, if not outright hatred, which some of the historic Eastern Churches have for the Catholic Church.
Nor is this just a matter of the past. Anyone who knows the obligatory canonical norms of the Catholic Church concerning Eastern Christian candidates to western religious orders like the Society?that such candidates must preserve the historic eastern tradition into which they were (or should have been) baptized, must remain faithful to their rite of origin, and must receive an adequate spiritual and intellectual formation to make this a reality?will have to admit that in some parts of the world the Society is still perpetrating grave injustices on these minority churches by skimming off candidates, often the best, and permitting them to be latinized, thereby effectively removing them from the service of their far more needy local Eastern Churches.
The work of studying, exposing, and denouncing these historic crimes is also a service of faith and justice: faith, because I believe that God wants of us nothing but the truth; justice, because it does reparation for past hurts and assists minority ecclesial communities of great antiquity, often of apostolic foundation, long before anyone ever heard of the Society of Jesus, to repossess their historic memory of which they had been deprived by the distortions of past history and the ravages of western ecclesiastical and intellectual imperialism.
To be attuned to the present teaching of the Church, any Catholic and Jesuit scholarship today must also be ecumenical. I said above that I worked in the service of the Churches. The plural is deliberate: Churches, not Church, since I am serving not only the Catholic communion of sui juris Churches, both Latin and Eastern Catholic, but also the Orthodox Sister Churches, in the spirit of the Catholic Church?s teaching on ecumenism. Ecumenism is not just a movement. It is a new way of being Christian. It is also a new way of being a scholar. Ecumenical scholarship is not content with the purely natural virtues of honesty and fairness, virtues one should be able to expect from any true scholar. Ecumenical scholarship takes things a long step further. Ecumenical scholarship is a new and specifically Christian way of studying Christian tradition in order to reconcile and unite, rather than to confute and dominate. Its deliberate intention is to emphasize the common tradition underlying differences which, though real, can be the accidental product of history, culture, language, rather than essential differences in the doctrine of the faith. Of course to remain scholarly, this effort must be carried out realistically, without in any way glossing over real differences.
But even in recognizing differences, this ecumenical effort must remain a two-way street where each side in the dialogue judges itself and its tradition by the exact same criteria and standards with which it judges the other. Eschewing all scapegoating and the double-standard, ecumenical scholarship seeks to describe the beliefs, traditions, and usages of other confessions in ways their own objective spokespersons would recognize as reliable and fair. Such a method renounces all caricature or ?oblique criticism,? in which the not-always-realized ideal of one Church is compared to the not-always-glorious realities of another.
So ecumenical scholarship rejects the very notion of contest or debate, seeking not confrontation but agreement and understanding. It tries to enter into the other?s point of view, to understand it insofar as possible with sympathy and agreement. It takes seriously the other?s critique of one?s own tradition, seeking to incorporate its positive contributions into one?s own thinking. It is a contest in reverse, a contest of love, one in which the parties seek to understand and justify not their own point of view, but that of their interlocutor.
Such an effort and method, far from being baseless romanticism, is rooted in generally accepted evangelical and Catholic theological principles, beginning with the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. The theological foundation for this method is our faith that God?s Holy Spirit is with his Church, protecting the integrity of its witness above all in the millennium of its undivided unity. Since some of the issues that divide us go right back to that first millennium, one must ineluctably conclude that these differences do not affect the substance of the apostolic faith. For if they did, then contrary to Jesus? promise (Mt 16:18), the ?gates of hell? would have indeed prevailed against his Church.
The next principle is also based on ecclesiology. The Catholic Church recognizes the Orthodox Churches to be the historic apostolic Christianity of the East, and Sister Churches of the Catholic Church. Consequently, no view of Christian tradition can be considered anything but partial that does not take full account of the age-old, traditional teaching of these Orthodox Sister Churches. Any theology must be measured not only against the common tradition of the undivided Church of the first millennium, but also against the ongoing witness of Orthodoxy as the Spirit-guided apostolic Christendom of the East. That does not mean that East or West has never been wrong. It does mean that neither can ever be ignored.
Furthermore, an authentic magisterium cannot contradict itself. Therefore, without denying the legitimate development of doctrine, in the case of apparently conflicting traditions of East and West, preferential consideration must be given to the witness of the undivided Church. This is especially true with respect to later polemics resulting from unilateral departures from or narrowing of the common tradition during the second millennium, of divided Christendom.
So ecumenical scholarship takes seriously the preamble to St. Ignatius? Spiritual Exercises: ?...every good Christian ought to be more willing to give a good interpretation to the statement of another than to condemn it as false. If he cannot give a good interpretation to this statement, he should ask the other how he understands it, and if he is in error, he should correct him with charity.? Ecumenical scholarship seeks to put the best interpretation on what the other does and says, to shine the exposing light of criticism evenly, on the failings of one?s own Church as well as on those of others. In short, it seeks to move Christian love into the realm of scholarship, and it is the implacable enemy of all forms of bigotry, intolerance, unfairness, selective reporting, and oblique comparisons that contrast the unrealized ideal of one?s own Church with the less-than-ideal reality of someone else?s.
I would like to think that my scholarship is also a service to the Catholic Church, first of all to the Eastern Catholic Churches, to whose service and revival I have dedicated my entire life, but also to the Roman Church. Although Latin Christianity has a glorious spiritual, theological, and liturgical apostolic tradition as ancient and worthy as any other, it badly needs to move beyond the insularity of its own local and limited tradition to appreciate and respect the fact that other apostolic traditions have values from which it must learn. In short, as Pope John Paul II has often repeated, the Church Universal must learn again to breathe with both its lungs, eastern as well as western?something that is equally true of the Christian East, which remains even more enclosed in the ghetto of its own particularity, glorious though it may be.
In particular, my ministry has been a work of liturgical scholarship. If the purpose of liturgy is to glorify God, the purpose of the study of liturgy, like that of all study, is understanding. Understanding involves the search for meaning, and in any reality we did not invent yesterday, this meaning can be ascertained only via an investigation of its origins and evolution, as well as how its meaning has been explained across the trajectory of its history. That is why in my writings and in the courses I teach, I continue, at the risk of being repetitious, to describe my aim as ?The historical development of X, Y, or Z and its meaning for today.? For my understanding of what Christian liturgy is, and what it means for today, proceeds from the premise that liturgy is an objective reality whose meaning is located in the data of Christian tradition. So amid the contemporary search for ?relevance? in liturgy and everything else, I continue to maintain, obstinately and against all odds, that there is nothing so relevant as knowledge, nothing so irrelevant as ignorance.
The only way to understand and critique?and, where needed, reform?the present manifestation of any cultural phenomenon is to see what it once was and how it got to be the way it is. One can do this only by studying its origins and evolution?in a word, its history, which of course includes its shape and uses today. Anything else is just make-believe, as Thomas J. Talley has well said: ?Our current discussions of pastoral praxis, theological meaning, and of much more rest finally in the assumption that we know what we are talking about; and to know what we are talking about demands knowing much more than can be generated by a mere creativity operating upon data drawn only from the experience of itself?(?Foreword? to R.F. Taft, Beyond East and West. Problems in Liturgical Understanding. Second revised and enlarged edition (Rome 1997, reprinted 2001) 11.).
English literature is not what we imagine it to be or what we wish it were. It is what it is. And we find that out not by asking ourselves how we feel about it, or by imagining what we would like it to be, but by reading it. The same is true of liturgy. It is an objective, existing reality. To know what it is one must study it, and that can only mean studying it in its several historical manifestations, past and present. Of course one is free to dislike what it is or has been, and hope to invent something else to take its place. That is not studying Christian liturgy, however, but imagining it, and the serious study of liturgy, like any other cultural phenomenon, must be based not on fantasy or dream-fulfillment, but on data. Any other method leaves one the victim of the latest cliche. The contemporary pastoral-liturgical scene has had enough of people busily engaged in the application of that which they do not possess.
Consequently, I often describe my scholarship as akin to trash removal. Like the rubbish man or the street-sweeper, I seek to clear away the mountain of trash under which so much of what is said and written today on liturgy, theology, spirituality groans. This does not mean that the study of theology or liturgy is just history. But since liturgy has a history, this history is studied not in order to recover the past (which is impossible), much less to recreate it (which would be fatuous), but simply in order to render liturgy as we find it intelligible. For the present can be fully understood only as part of a larger whole. In brief, to study an authentic tradition, one has first to recover whatever of it may have been washed away by the tides of time. More important, history is essential to the formation of a ?moving point of view,? a sense of relativity, of seeing the present as always in dynamic tension between past and future, and not as a static ?given.? Only in this way one can avoid the all-too-common deception of the young, who tend to consider every latest shift in modern consciousness as some great breakthrough of the human spirit imperceptible to their benighted forebears.
So I am uncomfortable with the notion that any aspect of theology is not also ex natura sua ?practical? or ?pastoral? theology, insofar as any religious values must ex professo affect life, than which there is surely nothing more ?practical.? I hold the historico-critical comparative study of liturgy to be an approach of proven results not just historically but also pastorally; an approach, I am convinced, that is at the basis of much of the real progress we have made in understanding and reforming liturgy in modern times. Other disciplines such as sociology and cultural anthropology, pastoral theology and spirituality, have of course made their contributions, too. But they have built on the patient uncovering of all possible options in the tradition turned up by digging painstakingly through the layers of our past.
Nor can we neglect the enormous impact of all this philological, text-critical, and historical liturgical research on ecumenical progress in our century. Our growing ecumenical agreement as to the meaning of eucharist as oblation or sacrifice is but one example. As for work-in-progress, the Chaldean Catholic Church and its Orthodox counterpart, the Assyrian Church of the East, are actively engaged in a most fruitful and fast-moving ecumenical dialogue. One of the outstanding issues is whether the Catholic Church can accept the validity of the ancient Anaphora of Addai and Mari, which, as you know, does not include the Cena Domini narrative with the Words of Institution.(This question has now been resolved positively by decision of the Supreme Magisterium. See R.F. Taft, ?Mass Without the Consecration? The Historic Agreement on the Eucharist between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East Promulgated 26 October 2001,? Worship 77 (2003) 482-509). Does anyone think for an instant that the question could even have been raised were it not for the results of decades of recent comparative studies of the anaphora in general by our colleagues like Thomas J. Talley, Enrico Mazza, Cesare Giraudo, S.J.; and of Addai and Mari in particular, with its clone the Maronite Anaphora Sharrar, including critical editions of both texts? The days have long passed when Catholics or Orthodox could dismiss such thorny issues a priori, from outside the historical continuum, as if sacramental theology were an astronaut-science floating tranquilly in outer space, independent of the mundane realities of liturgical history. Does any serious thinker wish to continue fighting over whether the Words of Institution or the consecratory Spirit-Epiclesis are the ?moment? or ?form of consecration? when it is more than probable that at least some of the earliest eucharistic prayers had neither?
This does not mean that history provides us models for imitation. The Church and its reformers can never be guided by a retrospective ideology. The past is always instructive but never normative. What its study, like all study, should provide is understanding, an understanding that challenges myths and frees us from the tyranny not just of any one frozen slice of the past, but also from the tyranny of the latest cliche, so that we can move ahead to solutions suitable for today in faithful freedom, faithful to living tradition that is always indebted to but free of the past.
This is why I am opposed to overdoing the distinction between the ?practical? and the ?historical? or ?theoretical? dimensions of any theological discipline, and especially of liturgy, for in my view they are inseparable: origins, meaning, practice go hand in hand. The ultimate purpose of any study of liturgy is threefold: [1] understanding, [2] based on knowledge, [3] with a view to application. What the liturgical scholar must above all facilitate is the second, which is prior to the other two in execution if not in importance. For understanding what any aspect of Christian liturgy?indeed Christian anything?means, and hence means for today; and therefore how it must be understood, celebrated, preached on the pastoral level; proceeds from the premise that Christian liturgy is an objective reality whose meaning is located not in what we think or feel or imagine or would like it to be, but in the data of Christian tradition. The only reliable way to understand and critique?and therefore, if necessary, reform?the present manifestation of any ecclesio-cultural phenomenon is to see what it once was and how it got to be the way it is. That is what we call history.
What all this means for me is best summed up in the following anecdote. Many years ago I received a letter from one of my students, a Latin rite missionary in the Middle East. As a westerner who had studied eastern liturgy, he had to celebrate a liturgy he did not study, and study one he did not celebrate not only because it was not his, but because he had no desire to make it his. He found it overburdened, deadeningly monotonous, stupefyingly long. Besides, the members of that Church would never tolerate a foreigner meddling in something so close to their whole being and self-identity as their rite. Maybe he should have studied Sacred Scripture instead, he mused? I answered with the following lines that sum up, as well as any artifice I could compose, what I hope my life?s work is all about.

Carissimo amico.
Believe me when I say I have often read and reflected on your cri du coeur concerning your future in liturgical studies. First, you must remain with your Latin rite, and that in itself is problematic in an Eastern rite land. There are many ways in which one can serve the church there without changing rites, and indeed I believe there are some rites that a westerner simply cannot adapt to and should not try. Secondly, [this] liturgy is so monasticized, so burdensome, that outside a monastery it would be difficult to live it fully. And the Office has a numbing sameness, as you said so well. All of these are signs of a certain stagnation in an ancient tradition that will some day have to take life and begin to develop once again. But it can be done only from within the tradition itself, and that in turn will require study of the tradition, study by one who loves it and its people and wishes to serve.
I can only give personal testimony to the enormous amount of good one can do by the objective, honest, scientific study of liturgy. As a teacher one can change people?s lives forever by bringing them into living contact with the wellsprings of tradition after the layers of later, unhappy developments and misunderstandings have been stripped away. As a writer one can also have a profound effect even on those who are such jealous guardians of their heritage. Of course this can be done only with the utmost objectivity, and with no ulterior motive but the desire to serve God by serving his people. I know perfectly well what I would do to change, restore, reform certain liturgies I study, but I have never put myself forward as a reformer. What the scholar has to offer is knowledge, from which comes understanding. With a few exceptions, because of the present situation of most Eastern Churches, this is a service that we in the West can best provide.
I do not say this with arrogance, or any idea that we are ?better? or ?more intelligent? than the orientals. But we are not oppressed by Communism or Islam, and we have the level of economic and educational development necessary to provide this service, which is a true ministry of God?s Church. This is an ecumenical service that Catholics can offer the Eastern Churches with no self-interest or attempt at fishing in their waters. Every Christian ministry, like that of our Redeemer, is one of reconciliation and service. That includes the ministry of scholarship, which serves nothing but the truth, in the service of the Truth.
So you are wrong in thinking that a stranger like yourself will never be able to involve himself in such matters. For there is no one else to do it. Of course there are those who from their throne on high will pronounce judgment, and say that of course since you are not Orthodox and do not really live the tradition, then you cannot really know what it is all about. But one cannot be bothered by that sort of gnosticism. I think you are especially mistaken in thinking that, perhaps, you should selected another area of concentration. Nothing could be further from the truth. The key to the heart of the Christian East is its liturgy. As you yourself say, it is only through the liturgy that Scripture, tradition, the Fathers, piety, spirituality?everything?is transmitted and lived. Sometimes, as you recognize, this expression of a living faith can become sclerotic, overgrown, too heavy. But underneath the overgrowth of centuries lie the jewels of a people?s incarnation of the Gospel, waiting to be uncovered by someone willing to cut back the brush.
I cannot imagine a more fitting, immensely rewarding ministry than to study the heritage of a people?and in the East that heritage is conserved and transmitted through the liturgy?in order to uncover its riches for the good of that same people, and of all peoples, to the unending glory of God?s eternal name. Of course it is not an easy ministry, and the results do not appear immediately, but I really could not imagine doing anything else. Apart from the intellectual and spiritual satisfaction it can give, and the good it can do, it is also good clean fun.

Beyond these Jesuit and ecclesial dimensions of this priestly-scholarly service, I consider this service a witness to the world. It is my unshakeable conviction that Christianity will survive in the modern secular and scientific world as a viable creed and way of life only if it is studied and explained with complete historico-critical objectivity by scholars who gain the respect of the secular world. In a world that no longer cares what or if one believes, or what, if any, ecclesial rank one holds, this respect is gained only by the intellectual rigor of one?s scholarship.

My life environment is Jesuit, academic, priestly/presbyteral, Eastern Catholic, and liturgical. But those are not for me separate and distinct compartments of life. I have already explained above how I consider my scholarship to be Jesuit scholarship.
The academic dimension, the concrete ambience in which I spend almost all my waking hours, is an atmosphere of colleagues and students, lectures and seminars, books and manuscripts and proofs, and the irreplaceable computer. When I am not teaching or in colloquy with students, or at my computer writing, I am almost without exception to be found at my desk in the reading room of the Oriental Institute library carrying out my research. I prefer to work in the library first of all because I constantly need to consult the standard collections of patristic and ecclesial sources available there in the reference room: to bring them to one?s private quarters is an act of unconscionable egotism automatically depriving others of their use.
But I work in the library also because it is where students and colleagues know they can find me and consult with me at any moment. I consider that to be part of my service to them. Furthermore, I am not a hermit by nature, and enjoy working in the company of others.
My life?s ambience is also priestly in the Pauline and Ignatian sense of that term. Christian priesthood, contrary to frequent attempts to narrow it to the eucharistic sacrifice, is a quality received in baptism that permeates and qualifies all Christian existence. That is why the Society of Jesus is a ?priestly order? even with respect to the work of our coadjutor brothers and non-ordained scholastics. The true offering of this priesthood is every act of Christian service done in union with the will of God, as is clear in the Ignatian vision of liturgy and spirituality. In the General Examen ?7, Ignatius says Jesuits vow ?to go anywhere His Holiness will order...for the sake of matters pertaining to the worship of God and the welfare of the Christian religion,? an affirmation that could not be more Pauline. For both Ignatius and Paul, the true Christian ?worship of God? comprises much more than what we do in church! This priestly ministry is specified but not exhausted by the presbyteral ministry of the ordained. Here too, Ignatius had a much broader and traditional vision of the presbyteral ministerial priesthood than contemporary attempts to limit it to eucharistic and sacramental ministry. Ignatius? emphasis on the ministry of the Word through the written and spoken word?hence his insistence on humanistic studies leading to eloquentia?shows this much broader vision.

My God is the wholly traditional trinitarian God of the early ecumenical councils, with a Christological orientation strongly Pauline and Ignatian in its understanding of our lives as instruments of Christ present and working through us in the world today. This ?high? Christology is fully congenial to that of the Byzantine tradition. East and West have different images of Christ. The liturgies of the Christian East remain indelibly marked by the trinitarian and Christological controversies of the period of the first seven councils, and certain liturgical attitudes current in the contemporary West remain totally alien to the eastern liturgical spirit. For the Christian East, whose piety I have absorbed through the liturgy, Christ remains the awesome Pantokrator, before whose sacred mysteries the worshiper bows down in reverential awe. But Christ is also the ?philanthropos/ chelovekoljubets,? the one who loves humankind, loved us, indeed, unto the death on the cross. He is the kenotic Jesus of Russian piety, the Jesus of Philippians 2:6-11, ?who, though his state was divine, did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself (ekenosen) to assume the condition of a slave...? This text is emblematic of Slavic Orthodox piety, a piety both distinct from and?in my view?more balanced than that of the Greeks, who reserve their emotional devotionalism for the Mother of God and the saints. The exquisite dialectic of this Philippians text, moving back and forth between Jesus? divine glory ab aeterno, His self-abasement, and his glorification by the Father, mirrors perfectly the tension in the Byzantine liturgy between Christ as both Pantokrator and Philanthropos-Theos.
Among the Slavs the awesome Byzantine vision of Christ-Pantokrator is strikingly balanced by the Slavonic ?Canon to the Most-Sweet Jesus (Sladchaishchemu Gospodu nashemu Iisusu Xristu)? in the Slavonic Book of Hours or Ierejskij Molitvoslov, a devotional text that cedes nothing to the intimate love for Jesus expressed in western devotion to the Sacred Heart, as Joseph Ledit, S.J., showed clearly enough in his little book on the Byzantine liturgical theme of the wound in Christ?s side.(La plaie du cote.-Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1970).
The sources of this liturgical Christology, at least in the Byzantine East, is the focus of the liturgy on the Paschal Mystery, which is not just resurrectional, but comprises the entire Passover of Jesus from death to new life. Though there is nothing here to which the Latin Christian would not subscribe, I do not think contemporary western Christological piety is as successful in holding these realities together in dynamic tension. The West tends toward Christological schizophrenia, a sort of post-modern Nestorianism. Its piety ricochets from an excessive familiarity to an excessive neo-Chacedonianism, from Christology-from-above to Christology-from-below. That is just a roundabout way of saying that western piety tends to be historicizing, and its familiarity with the human Jesus leaves the Godman receding back into the divinity. This western Christology runs the danger of disturbing the trinitarian structure of Christian piety. All Christians, of course, believe in the Holy Trinity. But here I am talking about a community?s actual faith-consciousness and its liturgical expression, which in the liturgies of the Christian East is in my view incomparably superior to what was traditional in the Latin West. Recent attempts to enrich the pneumatological and epicletic structure of western eucharistic prayers have not fully remedied this problem, which is one not of texts but of mentality.
Here too, of course, one must avoid cliches and know what one is talking about. The decidedly Christological stamp of the old Roman Canon Missae is a sign of great antiquity. That eucharistic prayer, obviously formulated before the impact of the late fourth-century pneumatological resolution at Constantinople I (AD 381), reflects a primitive euchologic theology much older than almost any extant eastern anaphora except Addai and Mari and the no-longer used UrChrysostom and UrBasil, pace the common myth that everything eastern is automatically older.
Nevertheless, eastern prayer is explicitly and consciously trinitarian in ways that western liturgical prayer is not. I am not talking about phrases, the repetition of trinitarian formulae like doxologies, but about the ?liturgie profonde,? which in the East simply cannot be regularly prayed without the attentive worshiper becoming imbued with a piety that remains trinitarian through and through. That, in my view, is simply not true of the West, where the Holy Spirit, though professed, is just not a consciously operative factor in a radically Christological liturgical piety.
Finally, Eastern liturgy and its consequent spirituality retain a sense of the absolute and awesome holiness, transcendence and unknowability of God, who is to be worshiped for that reason alone, a dimension which has also profoundly affected my own vision of God.
My idols or false gods? As one totally skeptical of all human authority figures and personality cults, I have no human gods and very few heroes. Perhaps I have ?divinized? the role of intellect and scholarship more than is suitable, and the value of work and accomplishment. I have often felt that 2 Thess 3:10 needs more stress in the Society of Jesus. But my life experience has taught me that there is no substitute for knowing something, and that earning our bread by the sweat of our face is what Gen 3:19 has destined us to, like it or not, and I have nothing but contempt for those able to do a day?s work who do not.

I was born January 9, 1932, in Providence, RI (USA), into a strongly Catholic upper-middle class American family. My mother, Katherine McGrath, a school teacher, was of Irish extraction: both of her parents were born in Ireland. My father, James L. Taft, Jr., was an attorney and later a judge. On his father?s side he came from an old New England Yankee Protestant family that first appears in American history in the 1600s, whose members would become prominent in several walks of professional and public life, giving the United States its twenty-seventh president, William Howard Taft (1909-13), as well as other eminent public figures such as the president?s son Senator Robert A. Taft (1889-1953). On his mother?s side my father was of Irish Catholic stock. My paternal grandfather, a convert from Protestantism, became a Catholic when he married.
Our family was perhaps somewhat better off than the average not only in living-standard but also culturally, since all my parents? siblings save one had a university education, something unusual at that time. I attended public schools until High School, and we received all our religious instruction at home from our parents. My father even taught my older brother and me how to serve Mass. My mother was a woman of deep prayer, and it fascinated me how long she prayed every night from her thick prayerbook like a priest reciting the Divine Office, so that I eventually asked her to give me such a prayerbook too, which she did. My father was a graduate of the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Massachusetts, and though somewhat anti-clerical and very vocal in his criticism of the clergy, he was a faithful practicing Catholic (in our family, missing Mass on Sundays or holydays was simply unthinkable) and a great admirer of the Jesuits, and he always told us he would be delighted if one of his sons entered the Society of Jesus. This, plus my admiration for the religious life of the Brothers of the Christian Schools who taught me in high school at LaSalle Academy in Providence, were the two strongest human influences on my Jesuit vocation.
Important, too, was my experience of liturgical prayer, though at the time I did not know such terminology. My childhood experience of a few simple but invariable family liturgical customs imbued me with a deep respect for tradition. During Lent we were roused at 6:00 A.M. and dragged off willy-nilly to Mass every day. On Holy Thursday evening the family went out together to visit the lavishly decorated, lovingly prepared repositories of seven churches. During the Holy Week Triduum, going to church was not something you did?apart from the necessities of life it was all you did. On Good Friday, from noon until three o?clock when the Savior hung on the cross, you were in your room alone with your mouth shut: no noise, no radio, no games. Then came the afternoon service of the Passion, the unveiling of the cross as the priest sang Ecce lignum crucis out of tune, the stripping of the altars, the empty tabernacle. Holy Saturday morning saw the kindling of the new fire, the blessing of the waters, the prophecies. And Easter morning dawned with new clothes and, at Mass, the Gloria and bells and alleluias and vestments of white and gold.
That was bad liturgy, people would say later. I?m not so sure. It had defects. It needed change and we changed it. It wouldn?t do now, especially after our experience with the vernacular. But the awesome power of its ritual mightily impressed one young boy. I do not recall being subjected to any lengthy mystagogy into the meaning of it all. I do know there were things that marked the rhythm of the year with reminders of a Savior born, dead, risen, and to come again. More importantly, these reminders had implications for what I, a little boy, was supposed to do. That sort of thing stays with you. I still can?t?just physically cannot?do anything from noon to three o?clock on Good Friday except go off by myself and think about the enormity of it all. Liturgical tradition is formed by the repetition of custom, by taking children when they are very young and doing the same things with them Advent and Christmas, Lent and Holy Week, Sundays and feasts and fasts, week after week, year after year. It is such simple childhood experiences, ordinary and shared by millions, that nurtured the vocations of my generation.

My vocation and its ideals have been adequately expressed above. I do not spend a lot of time on introspection, second-guessing reality, asking myself whether I should have done something else with my life. I put my hand to the plow and have not turned back, and for that I thank God?s loving kindness and merciful grace. I am in no way a tortured or anguished personality, just a worker in the vineyard. What I have accomplished is there for all to see and judge, and I am more than happy to submit myself to the verdict of my peers. I do not know what more I could have done unless there were more than twenty-four hours in the day. I have had a fascinating, extraordinarily varied, interesting, and influential life, and I consider myself a very happy and fulfilled human being. Though I will not pretend that the international fame and academic and ecclesiastical honors I have received are not a source of deep gratification on the natural level, the judgment of men and women is of less interest to me than that of God, and I await his judgment with confidence that his mercy will let some of my sweat for his Kingdom balance off my sinfulness and inadequacies, of which I am fully conscious.

Scholarly research and writing on the history and theology of liturgy, especially but not exclusively eastern liturgy, is the activity that has consumed most of my waking hours since I completed my formation. My bibliography of publications at the present moment (2005) contains 660 published titles, including sixteen books authored and seven others edited or co-edited, so that some of my friends jokingly accuse me of never having had an unpublished thought. In addition there are thirty-eight other writings finished and in the pipeline awaiting publication. I am probably the most widely published scholar writing on liturgy in the world today. The major project of this research is my ongoing, multi-volume History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, of which three volumes have already appeared, another is almost finished in first draft, and two more are on the way.

Though now (2005) I am already seventy-three years old, I do not consider myself quite into the sunset of my life, since God continues to bless me with good health and astonishing energy. But I am aware of my age and do think of death, especially as those near and dear to me pass one by one to their eternal reward. What do I think of death? I hope to die faithful to God, to myself, to my family and friends, and to my vocation, surrounded by those who have loved me. And I hope that when I am gone there will be someone to weep for me, to celebrate a Russian Pannixida for me, and maybe even an Irish tenor to sing ?Danny Boy? over my grave in memory of my Irish background, of which I remain proud and deeply grateful, despite the fact that I have travelled a long way eastward from it! What do I think of the world beyond? I almost never think about it at all?which must seem odd for a Catholic priest! But I firmly believe that God is just as present to me now as he will be then, so I see no need to worry much about what is safely in his hands.
In the Christian East we are accustomed to taking our vision from the liturgy, and so my vision of death and what follows is fashioned by the hauntingly beautiful texts and chants of the Russian wake-service, the Pannixida or requiem for the departed, in which we say over and over again the following prayer:
God of the spirits and of all flesh, who have trampled on death and vanquished the devil and given life to your world, give rest, O Lord, to the soul(s) of your departed servant(s), NN., in a place of light, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, from which pain, sorrow, and sighing have fled. Because You are good and love humankind, forgive their/his/her every offense, whether in word or deed or thought; for there is no one living and never will be who does not sin: You alone are without sin, your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and your word is truth. For You are the resurrection and the life and the repose of your departed servant(s), NN., Christ our God, and to You we give glory, together with your eternal Father, and your all-holy, good, and live-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages! Amen!
This vision, good enough for my beloved Russian liturgy, is good enough for me too: ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi. It is also a vision fully consonant with that of Ps 22/23, and of the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, esp. ??18, 22.

My image of my neighbor comes from the great contemplation on the Incarnation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, with its teeming millions jostling their way across the horizon of human history. No one who has lived in the East, as I have, could fail to be moved by this vision of a humanity that does not yet know Christ, or know him well enough.

The tasks I have planned will be brought to fruition only if I live with all my parts, especially my brain, in good working condition until I am one hundred years old, or if someone devises a way to double the number of working hours in the day. But the matter is of no concern to me. Letting go is an important virtue, and when the time comes I hope I will be able to let go with good grace, in the full knowledge that no one is essential, and that the world will continue to spin without my help.

I am not really sure I have any special ?image of the feminine world,? since I do not consider it a world apart from my own. Although I am sometimes accused of having the classic defects of an agressively male character?assertive, even aggressive, task-oriented, impatient, outspoken, opinionated, overbearing, rough, some would even say tough?I have a number of very close women friends, friendships that have brought great enrichment and joy to my life. Some priests and religious have an obvious phobia when it comes to women, and are incapable of relating to them normally. This is not my problem. I like women, relate to them normally, I hope, and I sense that women realize that and are comfortable with me. I have tried over the years to become more sensitive to the needs of women and to the gross injustices they have suffered and continue to suffer socially, economically, and in the Church. And I am proud to have been a major supporter of the Decree on Women as a delegate at our 34th Jesuit General Congregation (1995).

Being coherent is not a problem for me. One makes one?s choices and then follows them.

My utopia would be one in which the values enshrined in the New Testament and the social encyclicals, as well as in the constitutions of the western democracies, were truly internalized and lived in all societies and and by all individuals and institutions?beginning with the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus.

The question of the relation between science and art is beyond my competence, and I long ago learned not to give pronouncements based on ignorance. The mutual sharing of ignorance is a fatuous if common activity. But I do think that the pursuit of science and art are both acts of human creativity. The myth of the absolute objectivity of the natural sciences was exploded long ago.

As a child raised before the canonization of permissiveness, I learned to eat what was put in front of me and be grateful for it. Furthermore, as one who has lived in many countries and cultures, I long ago learned that the only way to eat well anywhere is to eat what the people of that country and culture eat. In general, contrary to the normal trend where everything from efficiency to democracy to honesty gets worse the more one goes south or east of almost anywhere on this side of the Atlantic, the countries with the best cuisine are in the southern tier, where the growing season is longer, vegetables and fruit remain varied and fresh, and where olive oil is used for cooking instead of grease. But of course as one who has lived thirty-nine years in Rome, I find Italian cuisine tops, and I like to cook as well as eat Italian, a cuisine more natural and simple than that of the French, who remain more pretentious and complicated in food as in everything else. As for beverages, wine is of course king, but I enjoy a Coke or a Pepsi too.

My relation to nature is the natural one of everyone who has to breathe air, drink water, eat food nurtured by earth and sun and rain. But I am not a ?tree-hugger.? I care about the destruction of the tropical rainforest not because I mourn for forests but because I do not want to see the earth?s lungs destroyed. So I am more an anthropocentric than an ecocentric environmentalist. The world was made for us, not vice-versa, according to Gen 1:28ff and Ignatius? Principle and Foundation: ?All other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him fulfill the end for which he is created.? And of course we must preserve our planet for the future, so I oppose mindless development or self-indulgent anthropocentrism. But I have been around long enough not to idealize pre-industrial or non-western cultures, nor am I hostile to modernity. I love all natural beauty, from beautiful women to beautiful vistas, and I love to walk in the hills and woods, but I want my nature in its natural state. A mountain meadow full of wildflowers is for me far more beautiful than a bouquet of flowers in a vase.

I am not particularly introspective, and do not spend an awful lot of time contemplating my own navel. Religiously, I see myself as a sinner with profound faith, a faith strongly conditioned by my eastern liturgical experience, which is the ground of my spiritual life. It is very difficult to communicate what this means to one who belongs to a western Christian tradition. In the East, liturgy is theophany, the privileged ground of our encounter with God, in which the mysteries are truly seen, albeit with the transfigured eyes of faith. What this means to the Eastern Christian can be gleaned from the following reply of a Russian Orthodox village priest to his Catholic confrere, who tried to tell him that what was important was the conversion of sinners, confession, the teachings of the catechism, prayer, beside which ?rite??i.e., liturgy?plays only a secondary role. The Russian priest replied:
Among you it is indeed only an accessory. Among us Orthodox (and at these words he blessed himself) it is not so. The liturgy is our common prayer, it initiates our faithful into the mystery of Christ better than all your catechism It passes before our eyes the life of our Christ, the Russian Christ, and that can be understood only in common, at our holy rites, in the mystery of our icons. When one sins, one sins alone. But to understand the mystery of the Risen Christ, neither your books nor your sermons are of any help. For that, one must have lived with the Orthodox Church the Joyous Night (Easter). And he blessed himself again. That says it all.
On the natural level, I see myself a person of great coherence. In friendship and personal relationships I am utterly loyal and faithful. In my work I am a doer, dedicated, focussed, organized, energetic, efficient, and relentlessly persistent in pursuing aims and fulfilling tasks. In my life?s broader aims I am unwaveringly consistent. Fifty years ago I decided as an eighteen year old novice what I wanted to do with my life as a Jesuit, and have not swerved from that path.
The downside of such a character is perhaps a neglect of the ?softer? virtues. But I am what I am and long ago gave up worrying about it.

My Catholic faith?not just Christian, but specifically Catholic faith?is the ground of my existence. I cannot even imagine not being a Catholic. Belonging to the Byzantine Catholic tradition has enormously enriched that faith for me in every way. What specific sense it gives to my life should be evident from what I have already said above.

As for other religions, my attitudes towards them are wholly conditioned by the present post-Vatican II teaching of the Catholic Church on the presence of God?s saving grace through them. But I already have enough on my plate dealing with seven Eastern Christian traditions, and am happy to entrust the rest of the universe to the care of others.

The Catholic Church at the end of the twentieth century seems somewhat ?on hold?. With a sick and aging pontiff, it is obvious that we are approaching the end of one pontificate and the beginning of another. The enormous success of Vatican II on almost every front has somewhat receded from the horizon, and a neo-conservatism that is in some instances aggressive, uncharitable, even outright cruel, is casting a pall over many parts of the Church. The extraordinarily creative leadership in many local hierarchies of the Vatican II era has been replaced by a leadership that in some cases ranges from the mediocre to the outright disastrous. One need only think of the dioceses of Sankt-Poelten in Austria, Chur in Switzerland until its bishop was finally ?promoted? out, Vienna until Cardinal Schoenborn took over... At every shift in modern history since the French Revolution, the Catholic Church?s unwillingness or inability to respond quickly and adequately to the needs of the times has led to the loss, one by one, of the secularists, the proletariat, the intellectuals, the youth. At present we are in the process of losing the lower clergy, the theologians, and the women. Who will be left?

My ideal model of the Catholic Church is described in the documents of Vatican II. The problem is to make reality correspond to the rhetoric.

The problems of today are no different from those of any other age: how to remain totally faithful to the Apostolic Tradition?tradition with a capital ?T??while responding to the ever-new needs of the times. What the latter are, are there for anyone to see: ecumenical questions like the urgently needed re-dimensioning of the role of the papacy (both theologically and in practice) and of the theology of the ordained ministry, the relation of the Church to Judaism, the problem of salvation in the non-biblical religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, new issues in genetic and medical ethics, the role of women, an adequate pastoral response to the burning issues of married and family life... That?s just a short list evident to anyone who is not blind.

Having abandoned the failed solutions (communism, socialism) to problems of poverty and development, we have not yet moved to a just society. The neo-capitalist economic framework may solve some problems but ignores other extremely grave ones. However, as one who lives in an affluent society these problems have very little direct affect on my life.

The Society of Jesus is my adopted family, and like any family it is both good and bad. The Society?s ideal remains for me a marvel because Ignatian spirituality, not fixated in any culture or mind-set but open-ended to growth both culturally and theologically, is a spirituality for every age. The problem of the Society of Jesus is the problem of any institution, including the Catholic Church: the ideal is great, but we do not live up to it.

The Society of the third millennium will continue to be stamped by the vision of the Arrupe years and the Vatican II renewal as incorporated in the great documents of the recent General Congregations. Neo-conservative attempts to turn back the clock will not succeed: most Jesuits are too intelligent for that. This is clearly seen in Jesuit reactions to the sprinkling of hardline integralist movements that raise their head within the Society from time to time. They are generally ignored, when not viewed with pity or contempt by most Jesuits.

My entire Jesuit life has involved inculturation in an Eastern Christian ecclesial tradition, with its liturgy and spirituality, but I have said enough about that already. In addition, I have spent thirty-nine years living in Rome?and not in the American ghetto in Rome?with the inevitable adaptation that has involved. Whether or not that has been successful, I leave to the judgment of my many Italian friends.

My professional life and my personal itinerary have already been dealt with above. I perceive no particular tensions between my Jesuit and professional life, but that may be true because I just resolve such possible tensions as I see fit. When I was a scholastic in formation one heard endless discussions about the ?problem? of the ?hyphenated priest?: priest-scientist, priest-scholar, priest-professor, priest-poet... A renewed theology of presbyteral ministry as found in St. Paul and St. Ignatius shows this to be a pseudo-problem. Far from excluding direct liturgical ministry, however, my Jesuit life-environment from the spiritual point of view is totally framed and determined by my liturgical life and ministry, something that is far more integral to the spirituality of the Byzantine rite than is customary in the Latin West outside of monasteries.

I recall many visual images from my past. One shows me rising before dawn and standing on the deck of the ship taking me to the Middle East in 1956 to see the coast of Portugal, our first landfall in Europe and my first glimpse of a country and continent not my own?the beginnings of the experience of being abroad that would ultimately have far more affect on my future life than I then realized, having now (2005) spent forty-four of my seventy-three years outside my homeland and the culture of my birth.

Russian liturgical chant is the sound that accompanies my life, though I also like classical, folk, and country music, and some?but not all?forms of popular modern vocal music and oriental music.

Sculpture, including modern sculpture, is the plastic art with most appeal.

I am the wrong one to ask about aphorisms, since I am notorious for them?so much so that in 1987 my students at the University of Notre Dame collected and published them in a booklet??The Sayings of Robert Taft S.J. and Sayings in the School of Taft. A Critical Edition Unexpurgated Unauthorized Version. Prepared by ICEL: International Committee on Extemporaneity in Lectures??which went into a second edition the same year. Two of my own vintage I often repeat: ?There is nothing so relevant as knowledge, nothing so irrelevant as ignorance? (that in response to the craving of theology students for ?relevance?); and ?Words are words, but things are things,? referring to the philological problem: its the reality that counts, not the description of it, which can change, and is often misunderstood anyway.

For one who has lived his life according to the liturgical rhythms of the East, the smell of good incense rising in the House of God as the symbol of our prayers raised unto his glory is the one that permeates my church clothing, and that I prefer to be associated with now and on the Last Day.