Oresta

daemon
Heh, Catholicism has always been a bizarre breeding ground of little ethnic variations, even on basic beliefs! I mean, take Voudoun or Santeria, for example--both of those are strange variations of Catholicism. In some areas of Africa, all of the priests marry, and bishops usually have multiple wives, due to local custom. Some Catholic churches have serious fundamentalist slants, some are even going charismatic (laying of hands, speaking in tongues, etc.). Catholicism is about as homogenous as Protestantism, in reality!

Yep. I was in a Catholic church in Sicily in 1956 B.V. (Before Vatican II) and noticed that the mosaic inscriptions over the alter were in Greek . The priest told me that the mass was given in Greek. When I mentioned this to an American priest some years later, he was surprised; he had never heard of such a thing. Imagine studying all that Latin for the priesthood and ending up in a parish in Palermo.

Ernest Sparks

I'm not surprised. Greek was an older liturgical language than Latin, even in Rome. A remnant of those early days exists in the "Kyrie Eleison", which means "Lord, have mercy" in Greek.