Seton Hall Professor Publishes Book on the Eastern Catholic Churches

Professor of Religion and Director of the Catholic Studies Program at Seton Hall University Ines Angeli Murzaku, Ph.D., has published a new book, Light from the East: The Catholic Eastern Churches Sixty Years After Vatican II, co-edited and co-authored with Ana Victoria Sima, Ph.D., of Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania.

A namesake predecessor of Pope Leo XIV, Leo XIII laid the modern foundation for defending the Eastern rites in Orientalium Dignitas (1894), explicitly safeguarding Eastern traditions and forbidding proselytism into the Latin Rite. John Paul II’s Orientale Lumen (1995) carried that vision into a new century: the “light from the East” is not ornamental, but essential to the life of the Church. Today, we may be living through a new Leo moment: a retrieval and renewed application of those same principles: not uniformity, but unity in diversity.

This new volume seeks to contribute to that “Leo moment.” Its chapters explore restoration and ressourcement, theological identity and ecumenical mission, diaspora and belonging, synodality in theory and practice, liturgy and mystagogy, resilience under pressure, renewed ecclesiological models and pastoral reforms that respond to post-conciliar challenges without surrendering Eastern distinctiveness in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church and other Eastern Catholic Churches.

If Vatican II gave the Eastern Catholic Churches the juridical and theological space to breathe, the present moment asks them to let their liturgies, canons and spiritual traditions resound clearly in parish life, in the academy and in ecumenical dialogue. The measure of success will not be the adoption of Latin solutions, but the credibility of Eastern holiness: Eucharistic, ascetical, communal and missionary.

From conciliar teaching to parish practice, from Rome to the peripheries, this “Leo moment” will belong to those Churches that preserve their inheritance while offering it generously in service to the whole Church. The scholarship gathered in this book aims to help the Eastern Catholic Churches do both: remain faithful to the ancient tradition and meet the challenges of the present with renewed clarity and courage.

The volume brings together leading scholars in the field to address this delicate and important theological question. It is published by Religions, an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open-access journal on religion and theology, published monthly online by MDPI, which, because of the strong reception of the special issue on the same topic, decided to turn it into a book. Among its contributors is Father Thomas P. Shubeck, Ph.D., adjunct professor of Pastoral Theology and a priest of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Passaic, who serves at the College Seminary of the Immaculate Conception School of Theology.

This project was conceived and brought to completion during Murzaku’s Fulbright sabbatical at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, last year. As Murzaku reflects: “I am grateful to Seton Hall University for the sabbatical, which gave me the time to think ‘East’ while being in the East, in Romania, among communities shaped by a rich Eastern Christian heritage. I am also grateful to Fulbright which made my research and stay in Romania, possible.”

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