As regards matters of faith, or in other words things which members of the Church are obliged to believe, between Catholics and Orthodox there is only. one important difference they disagree as regards the authority gave to St. Peter and his successors. The Protestant groups also reject the authority of the Pope, but in most cases they disagree with both Catholics and Orthodox as regards Mass, the Sacraments, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a great number of other points of belief. Thus from a Catholic's point of view, the Orthodox are a thousand times nearer to him than Protestants, in matters of faith. As T have just mentioned, the Orthodox have Holy Mass and the Sacraments the same as Catholics, but since the Orthodox Church is formed exclusively from Eastern Christians who split away from the Catholic Church in the eleventh century, their ceremonies for Mass and the Sacraments are performed m the traditional Eastern ways and in Eastern languages. The Catholic Church, Lo, those Christians who remained faithful in their obedience to the Pope consisted chiefly of western Christians who used Latin for their liturgy. As it is, however, out ofthe 360 millions of Catholics in the world only eight and one-half millions do not use the Latin Rite. Should those who broke away come back again to the Church, that eight and one-half millions of Catholics of the Eastern Rites would increase at once to something like 200 millions.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.