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Shades of British notables defending traditional . . .

British Celebrities Urge Pope Francis to Maintain Traditional Latin Mass

Prominent British cultural and public figures have appealed to Pope Francis to reconsider restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass.

The letter, published in The Times [of london], was signed by over 40 individuals including “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Princess Michael of Kent.

The letter expressed concerns over “worrying reports from Rome that the Latin Mass is to be banished from nearly every Catholic church.” The signatories said the Traditional Latin Mass has great cultural and historical significance of the, describing it as a “cathedral of text and gesture, developing … over many centuries.”

The appeal draws a parallel to a similar letter from 1971 led by figures like Agatha Christie, which resulted in the “Agatha Christie indult.” This allowed the Traditional Latin Mass to be celebrated on special occasions in England and Wales. “The old rite’s ability to encourage silence and contemplation is a treasure not easily replicated,” the new letter said.

The letter, like its predecessor, was “entirely ecumenical and non-political,” including Catholics, non-Catholics, and non-believers.

“We implore the Holy See to reconsider any further restriction of access to this magnificent spiritual and cultural heritage,” the letter urged.

It worked with Paul VI. This time around? Long shot.

Standing, kneeling for Communion, take your pick. On tongue or in hand. Reverence, anyone? Glad-handing usher, what would Jesus do? What Benedict said . . . before and after he became Benedict.

Cardinal Cupich gets a fellow thinking with his newspaper announcement of Eucharist Revival doings, including a special June 30 Mass at Holy Name Cathedral . . .

Recent prayer to God asking for the priest so there can be mass . . .

“Dear God,” I prayed when the time came and went for priest to ring entry bell and enter the sanctuary for the start of mass.
“Father X,” I said, “Where are you? Student body of parish school here, all of them, and you not here?”
“Please, God, find him!”
(Moments later) “Dear God, you found him! Two small minutes of waiting and he’s here. On with the Holy Sacrifice.”
I turn to the Scripture of the day, which I read aloud to the assemblage, including the students. Doing so, I see what the reformers did as reflecting their penchant for bookkeeping.
The Acts of the Apostles passage, standing alone on the page, is minutes of a meeting! Egad, devotional material begone!
It’s instruction at expense of devotion. Punchline?
“The Apostles and the presbyters met together to see about this matter,” I read and the rest heard.
We the reader and listeners are happy to hear this. And not everything is for devotion. Not all is a holy and sanctifying punchline. But why did the bookkeepers not veer somewhat from their neatness routine, conceivably adding just enough of what follows to make us want to hear more?
Which would be, would have been, this verse:
After much debate had taken place, Peter got up and said to them, “My brothers, you are well aware that from early days God made his choice among you that through my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe.”
Whetting listeners’ appetite for the next day’s reading.
Anyhow, the show must go on, in this case more than theatrical make-believe, but an event of earth-shaking significance, reenactment of the sacrifice of the cross.
Dear God, how can we ever thank you for that???

Liturgical language that works

From Mundabor about new UK lectionary:

It is a very Protestant thinking that the vehicle (the language, the translation) used to convey [Scriptural] truths and . . . values should be constantly updated to keep pace with the changes in spoken language or, more probably, the loss of literacy and general dumbification of the population. On the contrary, there is value in words remaining the same and reinforcing the sense of immutability, of timeless truths.

Indeed.

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When Henry David Thoreau walked into a Catholic church in Montreal, he had to hand it to those Romans, who clearly had something going he had found nowhere else . . .

. . . as he told in his A Yankee in Canada.

He found size, silence, reverence, none of which he had found In the “almost wholly profane” Protestant churches he knew. He spoke “not . . . only of the rich and splendid” structures such as he and a fellow traveller entered in 1850 as tourists,  but of “the humblest of them as well,” apart from the magnificence he described.

With a single companion, I found my way to the church of Notre Dame. I saw that it was of great size and signified something. It is said to be the largest ecclesiastical structure in North America, and can seat ten thousand. It is two hundred and fifty-five and a half feet long, and the groined ceiling is eighty feet above your head.

The Catholic are the only churches which I have seen worth remembering . . .

He and his companion had entered from a “hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages,” had “pushed aside the listed [designated?] door of this church,” and found themselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any.”

He didn’t but was sensitive to its aroma.

They saw “one or two women who had stolen a moment from the concerns of the day . . .  but if there had been fifty people there, it would still have been the most solitary place imaginable.”

Neither woman looked at them, “nor did one regard another.”

The two visitors “walked softly” down the aisle, “hats in hands.”

No one told them to do that.

“A troop of Canadians” came in “who had come to the city in the boat with us. One and all knelt in the aisle before the altar — somewhat awkwardly, in their homespun, as cattle prepare to lie down.

“And there we left them.”

It was as if some farmer’s sons from Marlboro [NJ], having come to cattle-show, were “silently kneeling in Concord meeting-house some Wednesday! Would there not soon be a mob peeping in at the windows?”

“It is true,” wrote the man from Walden Pond, “these Roman Catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself.”

Sinners all, of course.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “they are capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink ourselves even as oxen.”

Well.

These churches’ pictures and candles, “whether tallow or tin,” did not put him off. Neither did the pictures he saw, which “appeared tawdry.” Didn’t matter.

What got to him was “the quiet religious atmosphere of the place . . . a great cave in the midst of a city,” where “altars and tinsel” were “stalactics . . . where the still atmosphere and sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought.”

“Such a cave,” he enthused, “which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays — hardly long enough for an airing,—and then filled with a bustling congregation.”

Here instead was “a church where the priest is the least part, where you do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be heard.”

He concludes, with a crack at priests, unfortunately: “I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted.”

Asked what sparked my interest in downloading Michael P Foley’s paper, “The Whence and Whither of the Kiss of Peace in the Roman Rite” . . .

From the excellent Academia.edu site, I wrote:

That’s easy. Watching my fellow worshipers at daily and week-end mass waving and smiling at everyone else in the church in a remarkable show of brush-by behavior.

One can maybe catch one for a friendly smile, maybe, because almost no one wants to do more than catch an eye and get on to the next one. Hands wave like, oh reeds shaken by the wind, to use a Gospel phrase. Quite a scene.

Enough of quoting myself, something I wrote five minutes ago as if I’d found it in a weathered manuscript.