Uncategorized – Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

The tackling of Vatican 2 #3, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . . #3 #3 #3 #3

The last of writer’s introduction to his coming book . . .

We left off with this about the book as work in progress:

Part 5 of his coming book. . .

. . . traces the aftermath from Paul VI through the present pontificate, asking how the conciliar vocabulary ripened into the theology and pastoral practice of our own time.

It’s been at work, he says, in Council documents and encyclicals and explanations inspired by them, and official catechisms and codes that attempted to “domesticate” their language.

Getting us used to them, the better to have us take them for granted.

The book’s goal [will be] not to build a psychological portrait of “the spirit of the Council,” but to show, line by line, how certain sentences and choices of vocabulary made the present collapse possible and, in many cases, almost inevitable.

One long fait accompli.

He sees a grim picture, of “disoriented faithful — empty seminaries, closed parishes, profaned liturgies, catechisms that no longer catechize — the lived outcome of decisions made in aula and ratified in ink. In theology, words are deeds.”

Oh?

An adjective can shift the burden of a sentence. An adverb can hollow out a command. A cautious footnote can sabotage a dogmatic paragraph.

Catholics who kneel in half deserted churches, or who have had to seek refuge in marginal chapels and improvised altars, are living in the echo of those [phrases].

We don’t have to assume that “the true Church has perished or Christ has abandoned His promises.”

We do have to “face the possibility that . . . the official continuation of that Church has . . . become a counter witness to her own past, a counter church that survives by parasitism on the language and structures it inherited.”

Confusion.

And “recent claimants to the papal throne”? They either “lack authority” or “have abused it to the point of moral unusability.”

Yes, Virginia, there is such a word. Point being, morality be damned, full speed ahead to a new world out there, my friends, where the livin’ is easy . . .

“We must look honestly at what they have done with the Council they celebrate as their charter.”

Namely?

Calling a council in the first place “in an age that no longer believed in councils or in truth itself.”

The age itself being nothing to match up with., or accommodate. Lost cause, Newman would have said.

Look to the last years of Pius XII leading up to the John XXIII election, and “the strange confidence with which the Church opened her windows to a storm she could not control.”

“Only by returning to that moment,” says our man, “can we see the scale of what followed.”

Nothing beats hindsight, of course. It’s why people write books.

In his book our man raises the curtain “on the last years of a world that still believed the Church could not change because God did not change.

“Pius XII reigned over a hierarchy that seemed unshakable.” he says. But “the soil beneath it was already loosening.”

As a Jesuit trainee in the mid-’50s in a three-year stint as a philosophy student, there were distinctions between new and old thinkers.

Our man about these days:

Theologians who once whispered their theories in seminaries had begun to speak them aloud. Bishops who had sworn to defend tradition learned to speak of adaptation.

Surrender was in the air.

John XXIII called for a council which was greeted by most “as a curiosity.”

Nothing to get excited about, a “tidying” of things Catholic, “not a revolution,” begun quietly, ‘in offices and corridors.”

It’s what this book is about.

— That’s all for now. Next comes the book . . .

The tackling of Vatican 2 #2, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . . #2 #2 #2 #2 More of writer’s introduction. His argument outlined . . .

We left off with this about the book as work in progress:

Vatican II marked a moment when the Church began to describe herself in categories drawn from the modern mind rather than from revelation and metaphysics.

The Council replaced the vertical grammar of grace and sin with a horizontal grammar of experience and dialogue. The supernatural order was not . . . denied [but] was absorbed into the language of psychology, history, and sociology, where it could be reinterpreted at leisure. The faith still wore the old vestments, but it spoke a new dialect, one that made obedience sound like conversation and salvation sound like personal fulfillment.

The transformation . . .

. . . did not occur in a single decree or . . . year [but] unfolded through a sequence of texts that looked harmless when skimmed and dangerous when read slowly. . . .

. . . creating “a new ecclesiology in which the Church of Christ ‘subsists’ in the Church while extending, somehow, beyond her visible boundaries.”

Specifically . . .

The declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, borrowed the vocabulary of natural rights to restate an old truth about conscience, then quietly detached it from the ancient obligation to seek, embrace, and hold the one true faith.

And . . .

The pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes treated the modern world not as Babylon to be converted but as a dialogue partner to be affirmed and understood on its own terms.

Each text seemed only to adjust a hinge. Taken together, they turned the door.

Oh.

The book will examine those hinges one by one. . . . by placing conciliar texts alongside the magisterium that preceded them.

Making a series of comparisons:

The method is almost embarrassingly simple. One sets the Council’s own words beside the words of earlier popes and councils and asks whether they can be reconciled without violence to reason or to faith.

See how that plays out.

For instance . . .

When Leo XIII wrote that the Church “is one, in doctrine, in government, and in communion,” he spoke the language of identity.

When Lumen Gentium chose instead to present the Church in terms of “degrees of communion,” it adopted the language of approximation.

No comparison.

It’s not “a matter of style,” our man writes, but the difference “between a theology that thinks in clear borders” and one that’s like it. Close but no cigar.

Approximations, the better to match users’ zeal in the matter.

The usual defense tells us the Council should be understood “in continuity” with the past.

The writer pledges “as much sympathy as the facts allow.”

But continuity can’t mean that “a thing and its opposite are both true at the same time.

Either the Council expressed an accepted faith in “a new register” or it introduced a new one in the old phrases.

I think I captured the reader’s gist.

In any case, you have to read the documents as they stand, “not in consoling paraphrases” supplied when the difference had become clear.

I’m wrestling with this concept, looking forward to the book to be sure I have it right.

Meanwhile, there’s another “pious story” that must also be abandoned. “It is to say that the Council fathers were personally sound and merely wrote ambiguous texts that were later abused by unscrupulous interpreters.”

Which the writer doesn’t swallow.

“No doubt,” he says, there were many bishops who signed out of confusion, fear, habit, or misplaced trust. Yet there were also men who consciously wanted a break with the doctrine and discipline of the past, and who used pastoral language as a crowbar to pry the door open.

Say it isn’t so!

The record is “not one of pure intentions tragically misunderstood.”

Nope, it’s “a mixture of naivety and calculation, of sincere but misguided optimism and deliberate subversion. The crisis is therefore not only metaphysical or semantic. It is also moral.”

And thus the iron is dropped. Rats were in the pantry.

Vatican II must be studied, then, not as a random series of unfortunate interpretations, but as a chosen redirection of language and emphasis that many of its leading actors knew would have concrete consequences.

The bad guys, no doubt about it.

For some, that redirection was the whole point. They wanted liberty where the Church had once spoken of duty, dialogue where she had spoken of conversion, and “openness” where she had once insisted on guarding the flock.

Revolution, no doubt about it.

When eternal things are translated into modern idioms, they do not remain untouched in the process.

Language matters.

A mystery that is made “relevant” ceases to be mysterious.

Who needs mystery? Who’s in charge here, anyhow? Stick with the here and now, people. Something we know about.

A Church that begs to be understood begins to sound like a body asking the world’s permission to exist.

Has to prove itself, you know.

This book . . .

. . . follows the logic of the revolution it describes. Part One reconstructs the historical setting of the Council: the twilight of Pius XII, the election of John XXIII, preconciliar theological currents, machinery of the preparatory commissions, political maneuvers that sank their work.

Looking ahead to read about that.

Part Two . . .four constitutions. . . on the Church . . . liturgy . . . revelation . . . the Church in the modern world.

The decrees . . .

. . . where theory begins to govern the life of priests, religious, missionaries, and laity.

The declarations . . .

. . . in which the revolution speaks most openly . . . of religious liberty, ecumenism, and non-Christian religions.

More to come, one more item actually . . . Patience! . . .

The tackling of Vatican 2, book in works by prolific commentator on what’s wrong with holy mother church as it stands in these days as a shadow of itself . . .

Vatican II: The Anatomy of a Revolution Chris Jackson Dec 08, 2025

“If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?” — 1 Corinthians 14:8

It begins.

When the Second Vatican Council opened on an autumn morning in 1962, the Church still looked like a fortress that time had forgotten.

Latin rose from the altars like incense from a thousand years of continuity.

The same catechism that instructed peasants in Poland trained seminarians in Rome.

Priests spoke with the confidence of men who believed Heaven backed their every word.

The papal tiara still glimmered under the dome of Saint Peter’s, and Catholics still thought of it as a crown, not a costume piece.

But something new was in the works.

A few years later, the same Church seemed to wake up in a funhouse mirror. The tiara disappeared into a museum case; the language of sacrifice became the language of community; priests turned to face the people and discovered, too late, that the people had turned their backs.

The tree had not fallen, but the trunk had cracked, and the draft of a new religion . . . . insisted it was the old one.

Pastoral, they said.

The Council called itself such, promising to update without altering, reform without revolt. But claiming to be pastoral while leaving doctrine untouched invited the question, why did everything change?

Vatican II “did not invent heresy. but . . . loosened definitions so that almost anything could fit.

. . . . dogma became dialogue; what had been salvation became accompaniment. The Church began to explain herself to the world and, in the process, forgot to explain the world’s need for conversion.

Was aiming to please. Pity that.

None of this holier than thou stuff, this claiming to have the last word.

Here is a book that . . .

. . . examines . . . texts as a surgeon studies the tissue of a failed transplant, probing where the graft took, where the body rejected it, and where infection set in.

Author has no time for whether the Council “meant well.”

“Revolutions always mean well, at least for those who lead them.

Instead, he asks

whether the faith handed down from the Apostles could survive being rewritten in the grammar of modern man administered by men who increasingly preferred that grammar to the language of tradition.

I like that. They would hold the traditional to a test.

Woe.

The book is “not an elegy but an autopsy,” written for people who “consider the corpse worth examining, if only to understand how it died, who “suspect that somewhere under the rubble, the heart of the true Church still beats, awaiting resurrection”!

The church is dead, long live the church. Ouch.

Tricky business here, author is making the case for it with this book.

The Council introduced itself as an act of mercy. It would not condemn but invite; not define but dialogue — offer topics for discussion.

Its fathers “promised renewal without rupture, the Church speaking at last to the modern world in a language it could understand.”

Bold men.

Sixty years later, even many of its defenders concede that the result was bewildering.

We were promised a fresh spring; we received a long thaw in which the old forms remained on paper while the substance drained away.

The writer has put in years of picking apart what’s been said and done. Here he draws conclusions, for the reader to buy or dismiss.

“The trumpet sounded,” he tells us, “but the note was uncertain . . . ”

“This book begins from a simple proposition,” he writes. “Every Catholic generation receives a deposit, not a draft.

“Doctrine grows as a living thing grows, from the same root and in the same species.”

He gets mysterious here.

“It may branch, flower, and bear fruit, but it does not change into another plant.”

The council is when “the Church began to describe herself in categories drawn from the modern mind rather than from revelation and metaphysics.”

Its documents “replaced the vertical grammar of grace and sin with a horizontal grammar of experience and dialogue.”

Palpably so.

“The supernatural order was not flatly denied, but was absorbed into the language of psychology, history, and sociology, where it could be reinterpreted . . .”

This was to mess with Mister In Between, the opposite of accentuating the positive, too much too soon ascribing a hurtful, if not damnable, rethinking’ in which the faith “still wore the old vestments, but spoke a new dialect, one that made obedience sound like conversation and salvation sound like personal fulfillment.”

Go light on the hard stuff, my friend, let smooth be the tone.

Salvation? Says so much, as if something were so radically wrong that needed fixing. Fulfillment is better. We can live with that.

— More to come, of course —

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Scripture of the day talks turkey to people trying hard to do as Jesus wants us to do . . .

Take First Timothy 6, 6.2c-12 for a start, Paul at his best getting down to brass tacks about day-to-day issues.

On this day, 9/19/25, Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time, we have advice from him understandable by all and rich with sermonic possibilities.

“Beloved,” he says, “Teach and urge these things.”

He who “teaches something different” from what our Lord Jesus Christ taught “is conceited, understands nothing, and has a morbid disposition for arguments and verbal disputes.”

Paul minces no words.

He calls them conceited know-it-alls with a yen for arguing, says from them come “envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions,” who cause “friction among people” whose minds have been “corrupted.”

Heretics there were even then, “deprived of the truth, supposing religion to be a means of gain,” a this-world kind of thing.

He allows that with “contentment,” religion provides “a great gain,” in the realizing that we “brought nothing into the world . . . just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.”

You can’t take it with you, as the movie title had it ages ago.

With true religion, he says, “If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.”

On the other hand, “Those who want to be rich . . . are falling into temptation.”

The greedy find themselves dealing with “harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.”

“For the love of money,” he says, in what became a go-ahead line, “is the root of all evils,” leading some to stray from the faith and suffer “many pains.”

The perils of greed.

“But you, man of God,” he tells Timothy, are to “avoid all this,” instead pursuing “righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.

“Lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called when you made your commitment in the presence of many witnesses.”

And the day’s gospel, Luke 8:1-3, I must say, added little to all this . . .

Jesus journeyed from one town and village to another,
preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God.
Accompanying him were the Twelve
and some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities,
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out,
Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza,
Susanna, and many others
who provided for them out of their resources.

Contrast that with the Old Mass gospel:

GOSPEL Matt. 24:3-13
At that time, as Jesus was sitting on mount Olivet, the disciples came to him privately, saying: “Tell us when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming and of the consummation of the world?” And Jesus answering, said to them: “Take heed that no man seduce you. For many will come in my name saying, I am Christ. And they will seduce many. And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass: but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: And there shall be pestilences and famines and earthquakes in places. Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted and shall put you to death: and you shall be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then shall many be scandalized and shall betray one another and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise and shall seduce many. And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved.”

So be it in the ongoing parade of differences between our two Masses . . .

Stuck with the holy sacrifice

Have decided I’d make a terrible Protestant. It’s that I can’t stand sermons and I don’t sing. As for the latter, look, I’m the guy who, discovered by the St. Catherine of Siena choirmaster in the ‘40s to be the sour note that was ruining his rehearsal, was told to stop singing.

Our #1 son has perfect pitch, the Beye School music teacher told us many years ago, but I don’t. Fellow Jesuit Tom Walsh in the early days of our training, hearing me sing something, played the note (singular) back on the piano.

So I’m no Caruso. As for sermons, well I am a recovering preacher — doing quite well, thank you, not a word for 50 years — and so make a bad audience in the best of liturgical seasons.

What’s more, I write and edit, and so find myself re-saying what I hear, bridling at neologism, redundancy, and inept metaphor, and believe me, it’s distracting.

It doesn’t help that I have a conviction, born largely of my newspaper days, that your mother has to be checked out when she says she loves you, that even out and out editorializing has to be argument-based. “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur” — blandly stated is blandly denied.

Now having heard more than a few Protestant sermons in my years, I might be brought back to the listener’s role. They are generally better prepared than Catholics, in long and short run, and I have found myself sitting still for sermons in their churches.

Same might go for Jesuit preachers. As my Loyola-Wilmette rector Mike English used to say, “Our mediocre sermons are better than their mediocre sermons,” referring to the nearby Holy Cross at Notre Dame for Boys.

Either way, I am of course committed to my Roman Catholicism, emphasis on Roman, the world-class religious organization that with all its faults I still love if not (always) cherish and obey.

And if mediocre preaching is one of the faults, another of its habits makes up for that, namely its Holy Sacrifice.

That’s the mass as understood in my youth, not as currently, a meal, with deemphasis of the grand and the mystical in favor of the homey and familiar. Who needs it? We get homey and familiar all the time, don’t we?

That mass, celebrated “through out the world,” as the old Morning Offering has it, is quite the dramatic thing, when you get down to it. There I am in a back pew, anonymous as I can make myself, part of a worldwide event. Not bad for a onetime preacher.

Dear priests who improvise at Mass: Please don’t. At least not in gauche way. But if you have inspiration to pass on, go ahead. Huh?

Brother Joe Hoover, S.J., America Magazine poetry editor, has been doing more than showing up at mass.

“O priests, who improv prayers at Mass!” he writes. “Who give opening monologues to start the show!

“Who deliver closing arguments before the dismissal!

“Who make meaningful statements in between the ‘Lord have mercy’s’! (Lord, when we are not our best selves, when others do not receive the totality of all that we could be…. Lord have mercy.”)

Or “deliver closing arguments before the dismissal! . . . make meaningful statements in between the ‘Lord have mercy’s’! (Lord, when we are not our best selves, when others do not receive the totality of all that we could be…. Lord have mercy.)”

You know who are. . .

You “feel the need to make Mass personal or interesting or more spiritual than it appears on the surface to be . . . suddenly put the sign of peace at a different part of the Mass or change up in some fashion the standing and kneeling and sitting.”

You “do not want to appear . . . cold, officious church functionaries just rattling off words handed to them by a hyper-literal worship committee in some cold cellar of the Vatican.”

Are you listening?

O priests, trust yourselves! Trust that you are interesting and personal and spiritual as you are. [But what if you’re not?]

Trust that the energy you exude, your presence, your physicality, your posture, your voice is spiritual enough. [You’ve got it, show it.]

Trust that, and just say the words! Do the gestures! They are enough! It is like the old actor’s maxim: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

It’s you he’s talking to.

Joe accuses, but he also advises:

Even if parts of the liturgical script have been changed (some of it quite tragically—when you lose good poetry you lose good theology), even if it is not as lovely anymore, even then: Adding more words will not make Mass “better.”

No sir!

What you do is this:

“. . . cleanly speak the words as they are . . . let them flow through you, [and] the people in the pews may hear the Mass as they have never heard it before. “

Can you do that?

Yes you can!

“The Mass will . . . become interesting and personal and new. You do not need to do more. It’s not about you,” Brother Joe says.

Well maybe Joe would like to adjust that last sentence, in that the whole business seems to be about these priests . . .

Forget that. He means the congregation. As for himself, he can say all this because he’s a brother, not a priest, no “student of . . . the negotiables and non-negotiables of Mass-saying.” He has “no canonical agenda.”

He better not, of course, even if he were a priest — or a bishop for that matter. Trouble could become his middle name.

No, he’s “an actor, a playwright and someone who sits in the pews watching priests who feel that to follow the script is to essentially slice their brains out of their body and hand it over to Holy Mother Church.”

Can’t stand it, have to improvise, apparently.

Whatever. Joe is not all that opposed to improvising. Depends how it’s done.

Seeing the priest as an actor, he urges him “not simply to speak the text,” but also to give his audience “an experience,” as one “on stage” portraying his “spontaneous reactions,” keeping in mind that the point of it all is to help people “to pray.”

In pursuit of which he can do the opposite of what Joe’s been saying, “make comments during Mass.”

“Something falls and you acknowledge it; an altar server yawns dramatically, a baby cries with some kind of perfect timing, respond! Be human!” Joe urges.

Yes and no, Joe. He’s more than a functionary but he’s also more than — what? — an entertainer. And he owes it to pew-sitters to reflect his divine office, referring here not to the once-required daily prayers of the priest but to his unique role in re-enacting Calvary.

Joe has something else in mind. It’s the performance that counts.

He knows a priest who “during a chapel Mass, after holding his hands over the bread and wine and reciting ‘Make holy these gifts,’ then gestured to [his] small congregation,” adding “and these gifts.” Joe found it a “stunning” moment.

This man “could bring it off,” he says.

“Liturgy is not a science,” he explains. “If prayer were to become math, God help us all.”

“So yes,” he says, “if in some inspired moment at Mass you let go with something beautiful or funny or timely—unforced, not cloying, not ingratiating—fine. Pay attention. Live within the context. Don’t be rote and unaware.”

Let the spirit (of the moment) move you, but do it tastefully. And with your audience in mind.

I’ve been there for that sort of thing gone wild, and been appalled, amazed at the sacrilege involved, flip commentary and the like. And feel certain that’s not what Joe has in mind.

Meanwhile at mass . . .

Petitions, petitions, we got petitions. About many things, while one thing is important, namely acquiescence in whatever God sends.

Put another way: Pray for good (earthly) things for people you pray for but above all, good or bad, for people’s acceptance of what’s sent.

Meanwhile . . .

Fr. X said what? Couldn’t follow him, remained with my Kindle prayer book/missal, which I had loaded up with the day’s readings, new and old style. Even up to Communion time I remained on it. Way to go sometimes, re-reading Gospel, etc., savoring presence of the Savior.

Later, first thing on getting home, finding Bead counter 1 & 2, Crisis Mag 4-8-21, in which a Catholic man tells of hearing fellow Catholics mocking his “pious” behavior:

“In an earlier Crisis essay,” he “recalled the dismay at a social gathering when the host, a graduate of a Jesuit university, learned that his guest was a ‘bead counter.’

He had found that “liberal Christians approve . . . the social gospel” but “suspect a conflict” between works of mercy and “spiritual devotions” such as praying for the dead in the Hail Mary — ”Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

He noted that “pious” is said “with tongue in cheek or as a modifier before fool, fraud, and hypocrite.

“Pray for the dead if you like,” he wrote, telling what he says some social gospel adherents say, but “it would do real good for the living if you put in an hour at the food pantry.” Mother Theresa might have managed both, “but the rank and file really must choose.”

At another mass, Fr. Y is late, so there’s time for prayer before mass.

Another day, at sixes and sevens in various matters, the worshiper reminds himself of God. A solidifying practice. Puts things in perspective. The worshiper is not in complete charge, he already decided. But he can make of the day something good or bad.

“Peace” seems sometime a mantra for popes. “Love” is another. Very big in liturgy dictionary, but not for me. I often prefer respect. God is awesome, no one to cuddle up with. No?

It seems so. I aim to make the best of it. And gladly. I’m supposed to like it, and I do, trying to show respect all the way to the One in Charge. I’m a wicked person for not responding to the love business?

Thing is, I’m most comfortable with this approach. Caught up in things of this world am I? Face it.

So respect our neighbor? Act toward him or her with this approach. . . .

And 3, from Old Mass files, stuff to back us up, yes.

FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST:

God does not ask anyone to embrace suffering for its own sake. He asks only that we embrace His will, a divine will that can be shown through suffering as well as through good fortune. [Something to keep in mind. It’s consolation with a capital C]

God wills that all men and all the rest of creation be brought to share in the blessings of redemption, both now and in eternity.

He wills that atonement for sin should be made through sacrifice offered by Christ and His members.

He wills that mankind be converted and transformed through the realistic courage of apostolic charity.

Upon the ruins of selfish dreams, God must triumph. His infallible truth and invincible power guarantee the final and true glory of a redeemed world.

Meanwhile, Japanese men at McD’s, fast-talking. Cool cats.

Spain in 16th century, translations of the Bible were on the list of forbidden books! Women knew not Latin, so could not read the Bible. Teresa of Avila quizzed about meanings of Song of Songs passages, which nuns prayed.

Priest not master of liturgy, but servant, says Cardinal Sarah. But what else can he be, counters a reader, put up front as master of ceremonies and performer with a crowd before him?

At a “Liturgy Summit” at a Menlo Park, Cal,, seminary, Cardinal Robert Sarah recently observed that the priest is “not the master of the liturgy, but its servant,” liturgy being “not a place of self-expression, but of adoration” which the priest must celebrate “with devotion, obedience, gratitude, and according to the norms of the Church.”

Inspiring extended commentary by reader Irishpol:

Bishop Sarah [sic] should know however, that the Novus Ordo Mass was created to mirror Thomas Cranmer’s celebration of the Last Supper Mass—not the re-creation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary.

So priests’ improvisation is in synchronization with the New Order of things liturgical adopted by Holy Mother the Church in 1969 and vigorously supported by Holy Father Francis and apparently more recently by Holy Father Leo.

Priest-celebrants naturally “tend to mimic the Protestant preachers [a la Cranmer the architect of Protestant liturgy in 16th century] by promoting the clapping and joyful greeting of their neighbors throughout the Mass.”

That is actually what a Protestant service and the protestantized New Mass is all about.

Why then does Bishop Sarah not expect the “presider” to behave much like any Master of Ceremony should behave by joining in with the congregation as the “leader of the band” to encourage the joyful, celebratory atmosphere?

Unless Bishop S. is asking Novus O. priests to kick against the goad on a daily basis, hoping to (a) stay calm all the while and (b) avoid being disciplined by a mean old bishop he maybe labors under.

For Bishop Sarah or any of the other bishops to somehow or another pretend that the Novus Ordo Mass is actually the Traditional Latin Mass said in the vernacular is spectacularly disingenuous.

To be fair, he is urging priests to make the best out of a bad situation. He is unlikely unaware. But Irishpol makes his point, if somewhat hard on the veteran objector to imposition of Novus Ordo who as an “ultra conservative” at odds with the pope on a range of issues has had his knuckles rapped in the process.

Trouble is . . .

The Novus Ordo Mass is a celebration of Protestantism. Nevertheless, it appears those prelates want their flocks and their priests to celebrate a Novus Ordo Mass as if they were celebrating a TLM.

Oh my. Gotta think about that. “I suppose they could continue to do that,” continues Irishpol, “but if they did it would be like putting lipstick on a pig. At the end of the day you still have a pig”!

Well. He’s a great arguer. Goes overboard to make his points? Maybe. I

As for what the priest, or “compere”, does as supposed or presumed master of ceremonies for the joyful gathering he addresses, well, says Irishpol, he has to express himself somehow.

If it’s a “happy meal,” as a thorogh-going traddie friend puts it, then happy must he be, prefering not to be, the snake at a garden party.

Trouble is, Irishpol argues, in such a mass the priest becomes more and Christ becomes less.

“With the rise of vernacular liturgy, priestly ‘self-expression’ is EXACTLY what became inevitable.”

I get that. There he is, up front for all to see, and acting like a funeral director?

Not likely.

. . . more to come on priest at mass and related matters, including what a Jesuit is doing about the “self-expression” problem. Stay tuned . . .

Restore Individualistic Piety. Follow St Newman, Pius XII’s Mediator Dei, avoid “unthinking conformity to the collectivistic spirit of the times.” Take a pass on an unnecessary “feeling of community.”

Wrote about attending mass a while back, answering q. by a friend, young fellow in his 80s, suggesting how to find spiritual results at mass, nothing grand, mind you, but what picks you up and, and what the heck, perks you up in terms of doing the right thing.

New mass does its best to distract you, you know, when you’d like to pray. Just a little, you know . . .

James Baresel, in Rorate Caeli, quotes experts on the subject, among them Cardinal Newman, who in his 1848 novel Loss and Gain, describes Catholics at mass,

Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;—not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest.”

Another, Monsignor Ronald Knox, in his 1948 book The Mass in Slow Motion explained that “if you find it difficult or . . . dull trying to follow the Mass, you are much better employed in simply kneeling there and saying your prayers, with a book or without a book, while Mass is going on” and that “[t]he Church doesn’t oblige you to follow [the texts of Mass]; she only obliges you . . . to be there.”

A third writer, Father Bryan Houghton, in his 1958 novel Judith’s Marriage” set just before Vatican II, the main character found the mass nothing like what she thought “a religious ceremony ought to be” since it “was not in any sense a community service; everybody seemed to be doing exactly as he liked”:

The priest was “fiddling about with his tools in complete silence.” A father of a family was focused on pictures in the devotional book Garden of the Soul. His wife was saying the rosary. “Nobody was paying the slightest attention to the priest, just as the priest was not paying the slightest attention to the congregation.” Judith realized that what each person was doing in his own way was adoring God.

Pope Pius XII had made the point in his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei, “that it is impossible for all to be moved and attracted to the same extent by community prayers, hymns and liturgical services” and that Catholics “can adopt some other method which proves easier . . . they can lovingly meditate on the mysteries of Jesus Christ or perform other exercises of piety or recite prayers which, though they differ from the sacred rites, are still essentially in harmony with them.”

Pius XII was convinced that each person as an individual has his own individual talents and characters and it would seem “to accept that all will introduce at least some individualistic nuance into how they pray.”

Indeed, a person’s prayer is an intimate matter, not to be subsided in favor of what’s common. After all, the word itself, common has also the meaning lesser, as in the admittedly snobbish judgment, he or she is so common, less worthy of notice.

In any case, prayer is something special and not to be limited to what’s done as a group, which is also important, of course, but often subsidiary.

Baresel:

It would seem just as obvious that Catholics would realize and develop an increasing variety of ways to pray at Mass over the course of millennia.

No great intelligence should be needed to realize that the most important thing is for people to spiritually unite themselves as closely as possible to God and to the sacrifice being offered.

Emphasis on spiritually.

We don’t hear that kind of talk these days, immersed as we are or our leaders expect us to be in a “collectivist piety” tradition, “prioritizing . . . praying as part of a group over praying as well as possible.”

Yes.

We would rather hear the claim that “all will pray best at Mass if they do so as part of a self-conscious collective.”

Yes.

Baresel continued:

Rather than accept that they themselves pray better collectively because of their individual character, talents and temperaments, [the powers that be] put forward their own preferences as innate to human nature.

Not good, my friend, nor fitting in the circumstances.

Further:

Evidence that some pray better individualistically [are] dismissed with exemplary circular logic: an insistence that such people are ‘not open enough’ to praying collectively.

A pity.

Historically, Baresel concludes,

Catholics [have] had little interest in . . . fostering a collective spirit because they understood that the only essential “social” aspect of the Mass was a person’s membership in a social institution—the Church.

Contemporary preoccupation with creating a collective spirit is not the return to Patristic or Medieval piety that its advocates claim. It is a result of the influence of modern Continental philosophy—which elevates emotion above intellect and is therefore preoccupied with an unnecessary “feeling of community.”

How infrequently do we hear such opinion.

Touch and go in a worshiper’s everyday mass-going

7-1-23: Preacher in thespian mode. Good, if overdone. Hard to do well.

7-2-23: Fellow worshiper chats people up after mass. Proof of when church after mass is not a church but a social hall.

7-3-23: Preacher offers paralysis by analysis. How dry is he.

8-1-23: Chat sermon: “Have you noticed that . . . ” Twice. “I don’t see how . . . but . . . ” His version of “Right? . . . Right? . . . ” A sort of “Between you and me” approach. Over the back fence.

9-10-23: Sunday mass, two sisters chat throughout, mother ignores it. Preacher goes 12 minutes, delivering the good news. Girls continue, but at Sanctus they quiet down. Demonstrates power of liturgical sign, in this case bells, when all kneel and quiet descends. (Except when priest speaks out, time and again, sometimes loudly, mistakenly thinking he’s the legitimate focus!)

9-28-23: The day the book fell. Spilled out when I the reader, walking away after reading the pre-gospel passage, left it on the missal. On to the floor it went, scattering the many small sheets bearing names of the dead to be announced and prayed for! No dull moments when Jim’s the reader!

Bright spot: Fr. R. from Venezuela, celebrant at the altar, drops to hands and knees to help me gather them up! From that moment, he’s my favorite priest at the parish. (My next time as reader, the whole book had been cleaned and neatened up.)

10-5-23: On this day, I the reader and bells-ringer managed the reading and petitioning but let mind wander and missed my bells at Sanctus. But ever onward and upward, bit by bit to my ultimate goal — change it all to LATIN!!

— JUST KIDDING!!

Same day, to La Colombe, where at counter forgot name of my fave coffee, which usually was posted but on this day was nefariously missing. And young lady at counter refused to read my mind! I hate it when people do that!

As for what I was reading over coffee that day, later, OK?

The last of writer’s introduction to his coming book . . .

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