Mankind’s parents.
TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS PROPERS IN ENGLISH: THE VIGIL OF CHRISTMAS; Saints Adam and Eve
Mankind’s parents.
The mentality and modus agendi of Novus Ordo reformers, in a few words . . .
Key words and phrases here, help us understand what we have in Novus Ordo masses:
The feast of St. Thomas the Apostle has been kept on . . . December 21 from at least the ninth century. It was moved to July 3, the day mentioned by St. Jerome as the date of his martyrdom in India, by those who revised the calendar after the Second Vatican Council. They did this so that his feast would not interrupt the major ferial days of Advent leading to Christmas.
They wanted to tidy things up, calendar wise. They considered the feast of St. Thomas in later Advent out of place. Their liturgical rationalism made them blind to the wonderful interruption of late Advent made possible by the feast of this apostle.
You see this in the masses, where it’s almost a head trip that is offered worshipers. No room for what does not fit the outline.
The Gospel of the day is
the famous Gospel of “doubting Thomas” . . . heard also on the Sunday after Easter, Low Sunday. Heard on Low Sunday it makes sense as the continuing narrative of Jesus’ resurrection and appearances to the disciples. But it also makes sense in a discontinuous way today, four days before the celebration of the birth of Christ.
More later on this very point about liturgical fixers . . . Fussbudgets . . .
RORATE CAELI DESUPER, “Rain down ye heavens . . . “
Mass by candlelight just before dawn.
“THE RORATE MASS”A beautiful custom arose in Germany and Eastern Europe of saying an Advent Votive Mass of our Lady in the darkness just before dawn, entirely by candlelight. As well as being very ancient and very suitable to the few days before Christmass, it also comes round about the time (in the Northern hemisphere) of our shortest day. It thus has pastoral potential just when the human frame and psyche need to be cheered up by the prospect of lengthening days and the return of Light.
Mass goers went without their missals, were caught up in what they knew was happening. A lesson here.
(Oh. “Rorate coeli” are the first words of the post-introductory mass. “Rain down” is mine.)
Differences in the Old and New Liturgical Calendars: Slaughter of the feast days . . .
More of why liturgical change. “Armchair strategy of academics,” then-mere-cardinal Ratzinger called it.
It was incomprehensible and pointless to move feast days that people have been celebrating on particular days for hundreds (or thousands) of years, thus totally disrupting the annual nature of the liturgical year. And why change the calendar all around to a three year cycle named as years A, B, or C? Whoever thought that one up?
. . . .
From “the Feast of Faith” By J. Ratzinger ( later Pope Benedict XVI) in 1986:
“One of the weaknesses of the postconciliar liturgical reform can doubtless be traced to the armchair strategy of academics, drawing up things on paper which, in fact, would presuppose years of organic growth. The most blatant example of this is the reform of the Calendar: those responsible simply did not realize how much the various annual feasts had influenced Christian people’s relation to time. In redistributing these established feasts throughout the year according to some historical arithmetic – inconsistently applied at that – they ignored a fundamental law of religious life.”
Of course, Ratzinger later put his authority where his mouth (or pen) was, in 2007 as pope giving carte blanche approval for the Old Mass.
How the 1960s reformers treated the liturgy like mechanics putting car parts together, says Peter Kwasniewski
For instance, what ever happened to Ember Days?
The ancient tradition of Ember Days, like so many other traditions, was just wiped away in the 1960s, as part of the “extreme makeover” approach of a Vatican committee that suppressed or invented what they thought the world now needed. It’s completely contrary to the way the liturgy has always been treated: as an inheritance to be proudly maintained and jealously protected. How could such a thing have happened?
We were something new that had happened. Whoopee.
A purge of this magnitude arose from the belief that modern man is essentially different from his predecessors, to such an extent that what past generations possessed and made use of can no longer be assumed to be profitable to modern people. This belief, as false as the day is long, dovetailed with the mania for a system and method characteristic of modern times: with enough taxpayer dollars and enough committees, we can build a better world, or, in this case, a better worship.
A zest for tidiness came over the land.
There are multiple reasons for the mania, but they converge on one thing: the triumph of rational method and its (attempted) application to every domain of human life. By “rational method” I mean the sort of thing one finds in rationalist thinkers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, or Comte: the attempt to dominate reality by a self-contained logical system of axioms, theorems, and corollaries. In civil society, this becomes the attempt to create a rational “science of politics” and a system of human rights so that man’s happiness can be procured on Earth and the evils the flesh is heir to can be banished.
Romanticism was a failed response to the rationalist mania, and its failure was all the heavier because it bought the premise of the mania — namely, that system and method are the only ways to be rational. In reacting against rational method, romanticism thought it had to react against rationality itself.
So went the Church:
The groundbreaking essay “Bishops Unbound“ by Bronwen Catherine McShea exemplified how this mania invaded the Church long ago. To respond to the rise of rationally organized states, the Church adopted the same type of rational organization herself, overriding and overwriting centuries of local, organic traditions. To be fair, Protestantism had played those traditions to its advantage: get all the local canons to be heretics, and they’ll elect a heretical bishop. Some response, then, was needed. But in adopting the tactics of modernity, the Church began to drink in the view that system and method are the answer to every problem. We see that mentality extending to governing structures, seminaries, advice for confession, spiritual manuals, mass-produced artworks, you name it. The Church imitated the secular state in its absolutism, its legal codes, its proceduralism, and its regimentation. John Lamont’s analysis of the corruption of the concept of obedience (“Tyranny and Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Jesuit Tragedy”) fits into this picture as well.
Etc. etc. I love this guy. Heard him at a Catholic Citizens of Chicago luncheon some months back. If you are up to a deep dive into what’s gone wrong, he’s your man. More later in this piece and in general . . .
A Lutheran explains the importance of preaching the reality of Christ at Mass
If you haven’t got the faith, it doesn’t mean a thing.
[W]hen Christ is not proclaimed as the One who sits on the altar—whose true body and blood that were offered to God for the sin of the world are given to the Church for the remission of sins—when this reality is not understood or clearly confessed, then there is nothing left but window dressing and show.
Why concern yourself with paraments and vestments, or with liturgical propriety and rubrics, if the reason for all this is missing? Gottesdienst [a Lutheran movement and
organization] aims to provide a defense for the liturgy by confessing in no uncertain terms what the liturgy is for.We don’t genuflect, or make the sign of the cross, or bow, just because it’s the faddish thing to do, or because we happen to think it would be stylish to look Catholic. We do happen to do those things for pretty much the same reason they do them, though in their case it might be more of a matter of obligation than of confession, considering the fact that they have for centuries had a penchant for speaking of matters of the Gospel in terms of “holy obligations.” We are, however, quite willing to agree that where Christ is present, there solemnity is appropriate, and any lack of solemnity is inappropriate.
Bingo.
Happy Birthday Novus Ordo? – The American Catholic
Donald R. McClarey on having fun with the new-mass disasters — December 2, 2009 :
Among my many flaws is a deep appreciation for biting sarcasm. A recent post by Damian Thompson at his blog at the Telegraph is a masterpiece of this form of verbal combat:
I attend Novus Ordo masses, but I do think a fair argument can be made that there seems to be almost a deliberate effort over the past 45 years to strip from the Church the beautiful, the traditional, the mysterious and the moving for the ugly, the novel, the trite and the banal. I dimly recall the Latin Mass as I was born in 1957, but I do remember often being overwhelmed with awe. The Novus Ordo is many things, but awe-inspiring is rarely one of them, at least for me, except of course for the Eucharist. It is a legitimate Mass, and I have no time for those who would argue otherwise. However, I think the Church can do better, and has done much better, than what has often been inflicted on the people in the pews since the Sixties.
People for whom the whole business was to get them to PARTICIPATE and love it.
Searing comments by the highly esteemed Louis Bouyer on Novus Ordo as it was devised
From his Memoirs, here gathered by the prolific Joseph Shaw. The widely published Bouyer was in on the process from the start of Vatican 2. He refers to the concilium, or commission, charged with concretizing liturgical reform according to guidelines given by council’s document. Italics are added here.
Wrote Bouyer:
I should not like to be too harsh on this commission’s labours. It numbered a certain number of genuine scholars and more than one experienced and judicious pastor. Under different circumstances they might have accomplished excellent work. Unfortunately, on the one hand a deadly error in judgment placed the official leadership of the committee in the hands of a man who, though generous and brave, was not very knowledgeable: Cardinal Lercaro. He was utterly incapable of resisting the manoeuvres of the mealy-mouthed scoundrel that the Neapolitan Vincentian, Bugnini, a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty, soon revealed himself to be.
Even besides this, there was no hope of producing anything of greater value than what would actually come out of it, what with this claim of recasting from top to bottom and in a few months an entire liturgy it had taken twenty centuries to develop.
Shaw notes:
Bouyer’s description of personally bodging [trying this, trying that until somehow you get a product] together Eucharistic Prayer II with [another liturgiologist] Dom Botte in a cafe in Trastavere [in Rome], before rushing to the meeting at which it would be discussed, has already passed into legend. He was, in fact, revising it by the time he got to the cafe, but the scorn he had for the haste and the amateurishness of the whole process is searing.
He continues from Bouyer:
The worst of it was an impossible Offertory, in a Catholic Action, sentimental / workerist style, the handiwork of Fr Cellier, who with tailor-made arguments manipulated the despicable Bugnini in such a way that his production went through despite nearly unanimous opposition.
More Bouyer:
I prefer to say nothing, or so little of the new calendar, the handiwork of a trio of maniacs who suppressed, with no good reason, Septuagesima and the Octave of Pentecost and who scattered three quarters of the Saints higgledy-piggledy, all based on notions of their own!
Because these three hotheads obstinately refused to change anything in their work and because the Pope wanted to finish up quickly to avoid letting the chaos out of hand, their project, however insane, was accepted!
Of which more later. Call it the trials of Paul VI, or something like that. A saint he may be; but a judge or manager of men, not so much.
Bouyer, finally:
After all of this, it is not much surprise if, because of its unbelievable weaknesses, the pathetic creature we produced was to provoke laughter or indignation … so much so that it makes one forget any number of excellent elements it nevertheless contains [Shaw
liked the lectionary and the Common Preface, for example, though
the former was was too hastily composed], and that it would be a shame not to salvage as so many scattered pearls, in the revision which will inevitably be called for.
As it was, early and often in the decades to come, to little effect.
More later on the fearful mystery that became the Novus Ordo . . .
In Poland, a Roadside Billboard: “Stop Communion in the Hand!” — Catholicism Pure & Simple
That’s it. We have nothing to add. Just our most heartfelt congratulations to the Polish Association of Christian Culture for their beautiful campaign (click here) in promotion of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. (H/T to Rorate Caeli)
In Poland, a Roadside Billboard: “Stop Communion in the Hand!” — Catholicism Pure & Simple
Old-style Catholic mass in Oak Park, 1993, as in Chicago Tribune by Jim Bowman
Every time Julie Badon, a 46-year-old Berwyn homemaker and lifelong devout Catholic, goes to church in Oak Park on Sunday, she violates an edict of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.
The mass, in which a priest stands with his back to the people, who pray to God with prayer books and rosaries, is celebrated by a priest of the Society of St. Pius X, founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a Frenchman who rejected the reformist Second Vatican Council as the work of the devil and was excommunicated for ordaining bishops on his own.
For Julie Badon and hundreds of other worshipers at Our Lady Immaculate, 410 W. Washington Blvd., ostracism by her church is not too high a price to pay for the consolations of the pre-Vatican II mass and the devotion it inspires.
Every time Julie Badon, a 46-year-old Berwyn homemaker and lifelong devout Catholic, goes to church in Oak Park on Sunday, she violates an edict of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.
She does it anyhow, convinced that she has found at Our Lady Immaculate the one, true mass rejected for the most part by the one, true church she grew up in.
It’s a Tridentine Latin mass, outlawed for 13 years by one pope and only partly permitted by another, as of 1984.
The Lefebvre phenomenon is unique in recent Catholic history because, as a bishop who ordained other bishops, he set in motion a self-perpetuating rebel structure. It was the first major schism within the church since the turn-of-the-century exit of the Polish National Catholic Church of America.
Lefebvre ordained his four bishops in 1988, having broken off talks with the Vatican authorized by Pope John Paul II in an effort to head him off at the pass before he institutionalized his rebellion.
Lefebvre and his followers, the equally excommunicated priests and bishops of his society, have essentially told the Vatican to take the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), source of virtually all that is changed and modernized in the church, and shove it.
For Julie Badon and hundreds of other worshipers at Our Lady Immaculate, 410 W. Washington Blvd., ostracism by her church is not too high a price to pay for the consolations of the pre-Vatican II mass and the devotion it inspires.
It’s not the only Latin mass in town. Since February 1990, the archdiocese has allowed a Latin mass at three churches, one on Chicago’s Near Northwest Side, one on the South Side, and one in Antioch in Lake County.
But Our Lady Immaculate is the only local church run by the St. Pius X Society, an international organization that remains by far the biggest traditionalist thorn in the side of the Vatican since the Second Vatican Council.
At the heart of the rebellion, symbolic and symptomatic of the society’s rejection of changes in the church, is Sunday mass with incense and Latin and statues all around, as the mass used to be before the council.
To Our Lady Immaculate, worshipers come from Aurora, Oak Lawn, Rolling Meadows, Arlington Heights, the Northwest Side and points in between, self-described refugees from “the new mass” and the new church-what Catholicism hath wrought in the last 30 years.
`I feel like a dinosaur’
Balloons in church for her son’s first communion pushed Badon over the edge of churchly respectability 17 years ago; that and mass for a much-loved uncle held in the school basement around a small table surrounded by folding chairs.
“I wanted a mass for my uncle,” she said, “and instead I got a paraliturgy”-not a mass at all, but a prayer service modeled on a mass.
It wasn’t what she’d been raised on in several South Side parishes and a South Side high school-all of them gone now, like the Latin mass. She and her husband wanted their five children to have what they had as kids, “the sacraments, the way we were taught. Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur. Everything from my past is gone.”
At Our Lady Immaculate, it all returns. Rev. Peter Scott, a 35-year-old Australian ordained in 1988 by Archbishop Lefebvre, who died in 1991, commutes weekly from Kansas City, Mo., where he is U.S. superior for the Society of St. Pius X.
A slight, lean, dark-haired man who says mass with grave demeanor and preaches with verve and intensity, he is the chief deliverer to Badon and others of old-time Catholic religion, with its deep suspicion of the outside world, its emphasis on asceticism, and its confidence of possessing the true faith.
Living for the afterlife
“So many Catholics are Sunday Catholics,” Scott says from the pulpit after reading Scripture passages twice, first in Latin at the altar with his back to them and then in English from the pulpit. “They are a very common species. They don’t want to get involved.
“It’s a natural tendency. But we must overcome the spirit and influence of the world, perform our daily prayers, say the rosary, examine our conscience. We must watch closely over our daily lives, shunning immodesty, rock music, TV. The world is controlled by the passions of the flesh. The modern world is full of despair. It has no future, no hope.”
He decries “the liberalism of the day” and bids his listeners look ahead to the afterlife. “The torments of the world are allowed so that we might live not for this life but for eternity.” He extols “the joy of depending on God” and predicts, “Our sorrow can be turned into joy.”
Preaching like that keeps Francis Gaul coming back for more. Gaul, 74, a 1937 graduate of Mt. Carmel High School on the South Side, and his wife commute weekly from Des Plaines to Our Lady Immaculate. He hasn’t been to a new mass in 17 years.
He won’t attend any of the archdiocese-sanctioned Latin, or “indult” as they’re called, masses in the Chicago area. “The sermons would not be what I get here. The church isn’t Catholic anymore. It’s Protestant.”
“Today’s church is in direct contradiction with what the popes have taught,” Scott said. He argues that the church is in conflict because it approves religious liberty, ecumenism and the non-Latin mass, which were condemned, respectively, by Pius IX in 1864, Pius XI in 1929, and Pius XII in 1947.
The new mass is “Protestant in its inspiration,” vetted of its Catholic meaning for ecumenical reasons, Scott said. As such, it is “dangerous” to the faith of Catholics because it teaches the wrong things, de-emphasizing the sacrificial and emphasizing the communal-meal aspect of the mass.
For instance, worshipers in the new mass often hold hands while saying the “Pater Noster,” or “Lord’s Prayer.” Asked about this, Scott said derisively, “Oh, please.”
Hand-holding, balloons in the sanctuary, wine served in paper cups, wooden chalices and folk songs-it’s all anathema to members of Our Lady Immaculate, who worshiped 10 years at the Hillside Holiday Inn before coming to Oak Park.
At the Holiday Inn, they set up an instant chapel, bringing statues in garbage cans that they up-ended and draped as pedestals.
This sort of preparation is crucial for Miguel Garcia, a Northwest Side computer programmer and father of four small children, here 17 years from his native Mexico. Garcia rejects the “party atmosphere” of masses where the priest dresses in “ethnic colors so Spanish people can relate to it.” He finds it disrespectful, “because God is King.”
A `vertical’ approach
The more than 400-year-old Latin Tridentine mass (established by the counter-reformation Council of Trent) is “the true mass,” he said. “God instituted it one way, and we shouldn’t be changing it. That’s what happened at Vatican II.”
Something else happened, according to organist and choir director John Cooper of Clarendon Hills, an insurance salesman and part-time jazz pianist. It’s not just that the new mass “an atrocity.” The new church “hasn’t worked.” Seminaries are closing and mass attendance is down, thanks to “all this liberty baloney. People need some kind of regimentation,” he said.
As Scott put it, “No condemnation, no obligation. Popes always used to condemn things, but liberals don’t believe in condemning anybody.”
Scott terms Pope John Paul II “a conservative liberal” who is “very weak in governing the church. He has not acted against heresies.” One such heresy, Scott argues, is to “make man the center of the liturgy.”
Indeed, at Our Lady Immaculate, worshipers look to the altar. There is no handshake of peace before communion (received kneeling and on the tongue, not standing and in the hand), as in the new mass. It is what’s called a “vertical service,” teaching people to look up, to God, rather than “horizontally,” to one another.
“The way you worship affects your view of God,” Scott said. “It is not just sentimentality. We like Latin, the Gregorian mass, and incense. But none of these are the point.”
“What was touted as church renewal and revival has obviously fallen flat on its face,” said John Pfeiffer of Forest Park, a 32-year-old Loop attorney, referring to priestly defections, shortage of vocations, and the like.
“People don’t realize their Catholic faith is being snatched away from them, like in the time of Henry VIII,” said Rita McCarthy, a 40-ish Orland Park typesetter.
“At a funeral, there’s no mention of purgatory. In baptism there’s no mention of original sin. In marriage, emphasis is on the couple. But the first purpose of marriage is to have children, and the relationship of the couple is secondary. All of the sacraments have been watered down. People don’t know anything about sin anymore. Divorce, abortion, birth control condemn you to hell. People don’t seem to know that.”
The church is not amused
Authorized Latin masses are offered at three churches weekly-St. John Cantius, 825 N. Carpenter St.; St. Thomas More, 2828 W. 81st St.; and St. Peter, in Antioch-and every other week in Libertyville and Techny.
But Catholics are forbidden to attend Our Lady Immaculate in Oak Park, though an archdiocese official is wary of saying that it is a sin to do so or that specific penalties will be meted out.
The Society of St. Pius X is “not schismatic,” meaning it hasn’t formally split from Rome, notes Rev. Robert Flinn, vice chancellor of the archdiocese. Its bishops and priests are excommunicated, but its parishioners are welcomed back “just by coming, with no need for special absolution.” They need only “disassociate themselves from their Pius X church.”
That’s “moral persecution,” Scott said. “We remind (archdiocesan authorities) continually of what they ought to be. We have a sense of identity and purpose and mission which they have lost.”
Scott himself is a convert from Protestantism, drawn to Catholicism by the writings of St. John of the Cross, the 16th Century mystic who wrote from a prison cell after getting in trouble with the church, and by the traditional Latin mass. Scott had found the new mass “more Protestant than Protestant services” and lacking in reverence.
He met Lefebvre in Melbourne, asked to be ordained, and went to Switzerland for six years to study theology. Ordained in 1988, he was sent to the U.S., where he taught for two years at the society’s seminary in Winona, Minn.
Now based in Kansas City, he heads the society in the U.S. with its 35 priest members (of 250 worldwide) and 100 chapels and other installations in 38 states. He says mass in Elkhart, Ind., or Memphis on alternating Sundays after his Oak Park appearances.
A former Jesuit theological seminary in St. Mary’s, Kan., near Kansas City is the site of the society’s coed kindergarten-through-high-school “academy,” with 345 students, and its 50-student college. At St. Mary’s the society has its biggest parish, where 1,300 attend weekly. The Oak Park parish has 90 families. Weekly attendance is around 235.
The church, formerly Second Presbyterian of Oak Park, was bought for $390,000 by members of the Holiday Inn group. The society took over payments and spent $20,000 to rebuild the altar area and install new stained-glass windows and an altar rail-“to remake it as Catholic,” Scott said.
Traditional worship and morality are the key to Our Lady Immaculate’s attraction, but members’ finding a home away from home is strong as well, as with any successful church.
A sympathetic ear
Scott talks a tough game from the pulpit, but he also offers a good shoulder to cry on, to judge from Julie Badon’s experience. One of her daughters sought him out in the midst of a recent crisis.
“Father Scott counseled her and was very patient with her,” Badon said. “She really loves Father Scott, and has no qualms about approaching him.”
Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground 