New Mass, good, bad, indifferent? Its history with comments public and private, the latter based on sometimes unsettling experiences
Have to endorse this message, has a lot to do with keeping one spiritually fit. Think about it.
Spiritually? This but also but specifically the devotion aspect. Seems to me you have to feed the good you, keeping the bad you at bay. Hence prayer and attention in general to your interior life.
Short, to the point, “not bound to a particular time and place.”
An argument for Latin liturgy is that it brings a sense of the transcendent.
By transcendent, I do not necessarily mean “supernatural,” but rather that which is not bound to a particular time and place.
For example, 2 + 2 = 4 transcends time and place. It is as true in the US as it is in Switzerland. The same is true for moral principles or for Revelation.
Vernacular means local, and Catholic means universal.
John Paul II’s neo-conservative Church consisted in universal morals and local liturgies.
Such a structure is doomed to fail. Therefore, Amoris Laetitia was not a surprise.
Good stuff.
Bugnini story in nutshell . . .
By David Martin
If the engineers of the Neo-Reformation were able to advance their plans and bring forth a new Mass for the Church in defiance of centuries of divine guidance, it means they weren’t being watched too carefully. While John XXIII and his men were busy at work preparing for the Second Vatican Council in the years preceding the Council, there lay hidden in the Vatican a secret cabal of liturgical planners whose work would bring discredit to the Church and to the one appointed to lead it, Pope Paul VI.
At the helm was the infamous Msgr. Annibale Bugnini who had long been suspected of conspiracy. He and his clique formed the eye of this ecclesial hurricane that would later uproot the Faith and blow the Barque of Peter off its course.
Bugnini’s work as a liturgist goes back to 1947 when he began a twenty year period…
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In America Magazine, words to the wise:
O priests, who improv prayers at Mass! 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.)
O priests who feel the need to make Mass personal or interesting or more spiritual than it appears on the surface to be. Who 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. Who do not want to appear as cold, officious church functionaries just rattling off words handed to them by a hyper-literal worship committee in some cold cellar of the Vatican. O priests, trust yourselves!
Trust that you are interesting and personal and spiritual as you are. Trust that the energy you exude, your presence, your physicality, your posture, your voice is spiritual enough. 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!”
Brother Joe Hoover, SJ, America’s poetry editor, goes on and on, analyzing the dramatic and gently skewing the offenders. Read the whole thing.
Yes. The last two previous popes have done so:
As John Paul II and Benedict XVI lamented, there is scant evidence in our communities of any awareness of the distinction between worthy and unworthy communions—one of the most basic lessons children used to be taught in their catechism class.
The way we were:
Children in those primitive “pre-Vatican II days” were taught to practice virtue and avoid mortal sin because they should desire to be able to receive the Lord and be ever more perfectly united to Him, until they reached the glory of heaven where they would possess Him forever. They were taught that if one received the Lord in a state of mortal sin, one committed a further and a worse sin.
Can you imagine Pope Francis talking this way?
They were taught that making a good confession, with sorrow for sin and an intention to avoid it in future, was enough to put this bad situation right and restore them to God’s friendship. Who could seriously assert that most Catholics believe any of this today, or that they would even recognize, much less understand, the concepts?
Not I.
Interesting footnote:
[3] Msgr. [Robert Hugh] Benson wrote this about his Anglican days: “I was an official in a church that did not seem to know her own mind, even in matters directly connected with the salvation of the soul.… Might I, or might I not, tell my penitents that they are bound to confess their mortal sins before Communion? … The smallest Roman Catholic child knew precisely how to be reconciled to God, and to receive His grace…” (A City Set on a Hill). Does not this Anglican’s description of the problem in his own communion sound frightfully close to what may be found today in the Roman Catholic Church?
Yes.
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The first major step was the allowance of communion in the hand while standing???a sharp break from the deeply-ingrained practice of many centuries of kneeling in adoration at the altar rail and receiving on the tongue, like a baby bird being fed by its parent (as we see in countless medieval depictions of the pelican that has wounded her breast in order to feed her chicks).
This change had the obvious effect of making people think the Holy Eucharist wasn???t so mysterious and holy after all. If you can just take it in your hand like ordinary food, it might as well be a potato chip distributed at a party.[1]
The feeling of awe and reverence towards the Blessed Sacrament was systematically diminished and undermined through this modernist reintroduction of an ancient practice that had long since been discontinued by the Church in her pastoral wisdom.
Nor, as has been well documented, did the faithful themselves request the abolition of the custom of receiving on the tongue while kneeling; it was imposed by the self-styled ???experts.???[2]
More more more in this piece by the excellent Peter Kwasniewski . . .
These Anglican priests were taught to pray that way, most of them “abandoned prayer altogether.”
Some years before Vatican II, Dom Gregory Dix was, rather daringly, invited by Cardinal Gerlier of Lyons to give a lecture on Anglican spirituality.
In the discussion, he was asked by an unidentified priest whether the Anglican clergy were taught Ignatian spirituality.
Dix replied that it was the only kind that most of them were taught, and that this was very unfortunate, as it was a type that was very unsuitable to English people, so that most of them, having tried it without success, abandoned prayer altogether.
“Father, that is a truly Benedictine sentiment,” said the questioner as he sat down.
“That,” whispered the meeting’s chairman to the speaker, “was the Father Provincial of the Society of Jesus.”
Et mois? It was less a response from a continental than from a Jesuit, who was right on, Jesuit prayer being is somewhat of a soulless thing, or can be understood that way — systematic, grimly prosaic and punishing to its practitioner, laying on burdens and offering at best a modicum of comfort to him or her.
Grit your teeth and keep on gritting, that sort of thing. Of course, tell Southwell and Hopkins it does not breed poetry, keeping in mind, however, that the latter was an English product through and through and came to the Society an Oxford product and in the Society suffered greatly from boorish or at least unappreciative superiors.
. . . That is the question, given a quite reasonable answer by a priest writing into Fr. Z in 2016:
After my entry into the Catholic Church from Anglicanism and ordination as a Catholic priest, I approached the Archbishop about offering the Mass ad orientem.
His guidance to me was to “catechize the people” regarding whatever I was going to do. Since that time, at the 3 successive assignments I have had, I have periodically done just that.
Other priests whom I have served alongside have had varying reactions, some positive and some negative. In my current assignment, the priest here with me also started occasionally offering the Mass this way a few years ago, and has noticed that his perspective on the priesthood and the Mass has changed.
Something worth pursuing there.
With the arrival of the 1st Sunday of Advent, I took the opportunity for a renewal of this catechesis of the people as part of the homily. Currently, of the 13 Masses we have in an average week, 12 of them are offered ad orientem, though the last one may be shifting now in Advent.
Nuptial and funeral Masses may remain ad populum at times here, but that will be dependent upon pastoral discussion with the family involved. [boldface not mine]
I call that very interesting. It coincides with what Fr. Tony Brankin did, for instance, at his Berwyn IL parish, St. Odilo’s, as I reported in 2007 for Chicago Daily Observer. It was easy-does-it at first, gently ushering his parishioners into something old and new at the same time.
Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground 