Welcome back to Catholic Answers Live. One of the fun things about being here at Catholic Answers

is that sometimes we get all kinds of wonderful guests. Well, let's put it this way. You never know who will turn up. And we have a bishop, the bishop of the Melkite Church here in the United States. Bishop Beirutie is the eparchy of Newton is the official name. That's correct. Well, thank you for coming in.

Oh, thank you. It's a surprise visit, and thanks for allowing me on the show.

Well, now, do I say bishop or eparch? Well, it's actually bishop. The official term is

aparchial bishop because the term that's used right now is an eparchy, but historically

the use of diocese and our

legal title is a diocese. So we kind of go back and forth between the two, but within the U.S.

Conference of Bishops, they use the word eparchy for all the Eastern Catholic Diocese,

just to distinguish them from all the other diocese. Well, it is very gracious to you to come in and speak with us, but I think

many people will say, what's a Melkite? Tell me what a Melchite is. You're the bishop of the

Melchite diocese here in the U.S. So what's a Melchite? So if we think of when Jesus said,

go into the whole world and make disciples of all the nations, well, the disciples actually did that, the end of Gospel of Matthew. And they went to some of the major cities within the Roman Empire, and one of them was Antioch.

So in Acts chapter 11, it was an Antioch that the disciples, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians.

So the churches that developed within the Levant, the area of the Middle East that we know of today,

those were the native churches that developed with the rise of Christianity Middle East that we know of today, those were the native churches that

developed with the rise of Christianity. So they're developed within Catholicism, five liturgical

families. The largest in the west, Rome, was the Latin right. And then in the east, there are

four liturgical families. There's the Byzantine family, the Armenian family, the Syriac family, and the Coptic family.

So the Melchai Catholic Church is a church that is in full community with Rome, therefore, the word

Catholic, and we use the ancient liturgical tradition of the Byzantine family within the Catholic

church. So that's in brief. The word Melkite actually refers to the,

it's a word meaning an emperor or a king. And since the, the emperors protected the churches

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