Since all of the easterns had accepted VII, then yes, the sacraments had to be preserved and if the context of that was the Latin Rite, then yea.

There was ZERO public resistance among the Eastern bishops.


Many eastern Catholics have no problem being humble. And accepting this. You clearly do though have a problem with it.

You’re drawing sweeping ecclesiological conclusions from a very local experience, and that’s where the argument breaks down. Hearing Byzantine clergy critique Vatican II or modernism doesn’t mean the Byzantine Catholic Churches reject the Council or its doctrinal framework. Those same clergy commemorate the Pope, accept Vatican II as a valid ecuмenical council, operate under post‑conciliar canon law - (CCEO), and remain fully within the magisterial structure of the modern papacy (I realize that this doesn't really matter to you, but it merits being said).

What you’re witnessing is internal critique, not doctrinal dissent. The East didn’t “reject” Vatican II — it received it in the only way the East ever receives anything: slowly, organically, and without rewriting its theology. That’s not resistance; that’s the Eastern mode of reception.

Communion doesn’t erase theological diversity, but it absolutely does imply doctrinal alignment. If communion didn’t require doctrinal unity, then Arian, Iconoclast, and Monothelite bishops would have remained legitimate simply because they were inside the juridical structure. They didn’t. They were condemned precisely because communion without doctrinal alignment is counterfeit. The Byzantine Catholic Churches remain in communion with Rome because they accept the same dogmatic definitions, the same ecuмenical councils, and the same papal authority — even if they express these realities in a different idiom.

Ultimately, you’re comparing the East’s healthiest expressions to the West’s sickest ones. Vibrant Byzantine parishes, coherent catechesis, and ascetical spirituality are real — but they don’t represent the entire East any more than clown Masses represent the entire West.

Question about the CCEO: Does it allow for Communion to be given to non-Catholics like the 1983 Code does?

I believe this is it here:

Canon 671 - §1. Catholic ministers licitly administer the sacraments only to Catholic Christian faithful, who, likewise, licitly receive the sacraments only from Catholic ministers. §2. If necessity requires it or genuine spiritual advantage suggests it and provided that the danger of error or indifferentism is avoided, it is permitted for Catholic Christian faithful, for whom it is physically or morally impossible to approach a Catholic minister, to receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist and anointing of the sick from non-Catholic ministers, in whose Churches these sacraments are valid. §3. Likewise Catholic ministers licitly administer the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist and anointing of the sick to Christian faithful of Eastern Churches, who do not have full communion with the Catholic Church, if they ask for them on their own and are properly disposed. This holds also for the Christian faithful of other Churches, who according to the judgment of the Apostolic See, are in the same condition as the Eastern Churches as far as the sacraments are concerned. §4. If there is a danger of death or another matter of serious necessity in the judgment of the eparchial bishop, the synod of bishops of the patriarchal Church or the council of hierarchs, Catholic ministers licitly administer the same sacraments also to other Christians not having full communion with the Catholic Church, who cannot approach the ministers of their own ecclesial communities and who request them on their own, provided they manifest a faith consonant with that of the Catholic Church concerning these sacraments and are rightly disposed. §5. For the cases in §§2, 3 and 4, norms of particular law are to be enacted only after consultation with at least the local competent authority of the non-Catholic Church or ecclesial community concerned.

Just because they kept the traditional liturgy does not mean they resisted.

Even the indulters did that.

And the indulters did mutate doctrine.

Why dont you try talking to the resistance eastern catholics who have suffered at the hands of the modernist eastern bishops.

That might be a useful wake up call for you.

Get you out of the romance you seem to be involved in.

The SSPX today has roughly 650 priests worldwide. In addition to that, there exist other valid traditional Latin bishops outside the SSPX, as well as valid bishops in the Byzantine Churches, some of which demonstrably preserved the faith, sacraments, and apostolic continuity through the post-conciliar period. That materially changes the situation.


If sufficient ordinary means exist for providing priests and sacraments throughout the world, then the argument for a continuing extraordinary state of necessity at the episcopal level no longer holds.

Even if parts of the CCEO are poorly written or open to abuse, that fact has no bearing on whether the East is Catholic unless one can demonstrate a dogmatic rupture, a contradiction of defined doctrine, or a redefinition of the sacraments themselves.

In the end, practice does not decide catholicity, and paperwork does not either. Dogma does.

Canon 671 of the CCEO would indeed be seen as a rupture, because the Church consistently treated communicatio in sacris with heretics and schismatics as something gravely forbidden, not merely by positive law but by the very nature of the Church and the sacraments. The 1917 Code of Canon Law forbade giving the sacraments to non‑Catholics and receiving them from non‑Catholic ministers, except in very narrow cases like baptism in danger of death, reflecting an already long‑standing discipline that common worship and sacramental sharing with those outside the Church was illicit. Pius XI in Mortalium Animos condemned common religious acts with non‑Catholics as contrary to the divine constitution of the Church, precisely because they obscure the truth that unity of faith and submission to the Roman Pontiff are necessary for full incorporation into the Church. Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum taught that unity of faith and unity of government are essential notes of the Church, and that separation from the Roman Pontiff breaks visible unity; this undergirded the long‑standing refusal to treat sacramental communion as possible where ecclesial communion is objectively ruptured. Pre‑conciliar theology and practice thus saw the sacraments—especially the Eucharist—as belonging to the faithful who are visibly in the Church, and communicatio in sacris with those publicly separated was treated as intrinsically disordered, not as something the Church could freely expand by legislation.

Canon 671 authorizes what earlier magisterial teaching and universal discipline regarded as excluded by the very nature of the sacraments and the Church’s visible unity. The shift from “absolutely forbidden except perhaps in extremis” to “permitted under broader conditions of necessity, spiritual advantage, or simple request in the case of Eastern non‑Catholics” would not be seen as a mere disciplinary adjustment, but as a practical denial of the earlier claim that the sacraments are to be given only to those who are visibly within the unity of the Church. That is why, judged strictly by pre‑Vatican II categories and sources, canon 671 would be considered a rupture: it treats sacramental sharing with those outside full communion as something the Church can positively regulate and extend, whereas earlier magisterial teaching and law treated such sharing as fundamentally at odds with the divine order of faith, the Church, and the sacraments themselves. The Church cannot receive heretical/evil laws to promulgate as universal disciplines. The Byzantines received Canon 671 under John Paul II. The Latins received it in the 1983 Code (c. 844). This is a rupture from not from a matter of ecclesiastical law, but Divine Law. That is why the Easterners are permitted to stay in their own little bubble and they don't have to dance to all the tunes that the Vatican plays in every regard, because they have already compromised themselves by accepting evil laws (if not in practice everywhere) then in principle at the very least.
The assertion that “dogma decides catholicity” is correct—but that is precisely why pre‑Vatican II theology forbade ordinary sacramental sharing. Dogma teaches that the Church is visibly one, that unity of faith and unity of government are essential marks, and that the sacraments belong to the faithful who are within that unity. Because sacramental discipline flowed directly from these dogmatic truths, it was not “paperwork” but the concrete expression of the Church’s divine constitution. You seem to be pitting dogma against discipline, but in pre‑Vatican II Catholic theology, the two cannot be separated: sacramental discipline is the lived application of dogma, not its contradiction.