I've written on the Maronites at length before. As others have pointed out, of the Eastern Rites, they've always been the most "Romanized" ... for good, and now also for bad. So, the changes they've implemented are mostly externals ... lay (female) readers, cantors, altar girls, altar in center, and Mass / Liturgy facing the people ... and a lot of their music is horrible. With that said, their Sacraments are still valid, both Holy Orders and the others. I knew a Maronite bishop in Cleveland and went to Confession to him once, and he gave me absolution using the full Traditional absolution form in Latin. He didn't know at the time that I was Roman Rite. Many Maronites studied in Rome. They're a little bit less "standard" in that if you find a conservative or Traditional leaning Maronite, his Mass would very much resemble a Tridentine Rite Mass, whereas another might look externally closer to a NO clown Mass. There was a Maronite priest in Chicago back in the 1980s who detested the modernizations, and was very friendly with SSPX, welcoming SSPX seminarians at his chapel there, and his Mass could have been mistaken for a Tridentine Latin Mass. Thankfully, given their manner of distributing Holy Communion, you at least won't find Communion in the hand there.
As I said, they're valid, but you always have to be on the lookout for the occasional bi-ritual type or the transfer who had been ordained Novus Ordo (even Mitch Pacwa of EWTN does Maronite Liturgies, as does a former SSPX priest).
If it were my only or only reasonable option, I might go there to receive the Sacraments, perhaps float out in the vestibule until the Canon (Anaphora) to avoid the lay readers, etc. They do still generally do the main consecration (essential form) in Aramaic, their traditional sacred language.
Topic: The Maronite liturgy? (Read 6610 times)