Cardinal Sarah’s fearless cri de coeur | Catholic Herald

The man who can’t make it with il papa;

Cardinal Robert Sarah is not the most influential figure within the Roman Curia. Although he is prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, one of the most important Vatican departments, his power is tightly circumscribed.

After he gave a speech in 2016 urging priests worldwide to celebrate Mass facing east, he received a rare public rebuke.

Later the Pope made sweeping changes to the membership of his Congregation – a move that was perceived as removing his supporters and replacing them with those who do not share his liturgical vision.

Il papa, probably for political reasons — he’s African, isn’t he? — has apparently decided he can’t fire him, or doesn’t have to. But the old bar bouncer can still poke fingers in his eye.

The bothersome cardinal in turn may be neutralized in his lofty position, but he can write books, can’t he? And “despite his relative lack of sway at the Vatican, when [he] speaks, the world listens,” says The Catholic Herald.

Which surely irritates papa. In the latest of the cardinal’s books, Le soir approche et déjà le jour baisse, to be unleashed on the English-speaking world in September as The Day is Now Far Spent from Ignatius Press, he “argues that darkness is falling over our civilisation” and “the West is in an advanced state of spiritual collapse and can only be saved by rediscovering Christ.”

He’s a prophet, for all that, apparently crying in the wilderness as far as il papa and his minions are concerned.

New Oxford Book of Christian Verse as sermon fodder . . .

 . . .  as using George Herbert’s “Redemption,”  — on a platter for the inventive preacher — which 

condenses Christian teaching about redemption in Christ’s death on the Cross into a single image of a tenant seeking a new lease from his lord.

 “Single image,” yes. Every preacher wants that.

In the poem drawing on Luke’s parable of the tenants but with a twist, namely that this tenant is not wicked, but 

recognizes his own fruitlessness, and seeks out his lord.

And, seeking Him out,

journeys to heaven, then to the wealthy on earth, but [only] among sinners finds his lord dying, and receives his new lease.

 On life, yes.

But I have in mind a selective reading of the poem, aiming at driving home a general point — note well, one general point — planting perhaps a seed of wonder at what God hath wrought for those who love Him, letting the poet make that point.

One such point is the most a sermon can do, I hope we agree.

For instance, in the case of “Redemption,”

Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
    Not thriving [in trouble], I resolvèd [3-syllable word here] to be bold,
    And make a suit [put my case] unto him, to afford [grant me]
A new small-rented lease [something I can afford in a landlord’s market], and cancel th’ old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought;
    They told me there that he was lately gone [to see]
    About some land, which he had dearly bought [at such a price!]
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.
I straight [immediately] returned, and knowing his great birth,  [how great he is]
    Sought him accordingly in great resorts; [where the elite meet]
    In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts; [where great people gather]
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
    Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied, [saw]
    Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.
Wow.
It’s all about Jesus buying our salvation and us going to Him to cash it in, one might say, in a once-in-a-lifetime transaction, meaning how marvelous it is, taken pure and simple, making no complicated doctrinal statement, nor implying one.

Sung Latin Mass Saturday March 16, St. Ita’s Chicago

Jim Bowman's avatarBlithe Spirit

From Veritas, Bonitas, Pulchritas — the True, the Good, the Beautiful:

Discover the Latin mass.  You’re invited to a SUNG LATIN MASS, 1962 Roman Missal. Antonio Lotti’s Mass for Three Voices. Saturday March 16, 2 PM

Site also has list of events, mostly sung masses as above, in or centering on churches throughout the archdiocese since October, 2017.

Quite an operation, bearing unmistakable organizational and doctrinal-fidelity mark of Opus Dei, which operates almost always under media radar, relying on focused communication.

Go here for Facebook and here for Twitter elaborations.

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The doctoring of a council document, the one on worship, from which important footnotes disappeared

Why important? Because they referred to council fathers’ reasoning behind liturgical changes, positioning them in the history of such change, from Pius X to Pius XII.

From the article pointing this out, by Dr. Susan Benofy, in the Adoremus Bulletin, June of 2015, cited here:

[T]he idea that the council was a continuation of work already begun was obscured by numerous commentaries that treated [Sacrosanctum
Concilium, the document in question] as a departure from the past, the beginning of a “new” liturgy for the “new” post-Vatican II church.

This brave new world concept, was declaimed happily by Joseph Gelineau, S.J., in his book The Liturgy: Today and Tomorrow (New York: Paulist Press, 1978): “the Roman rite as we knew it exists no more. It has gone. Some walls of the structure have fallen, others have been altered; we can look at it as a ruin or as the partial foundation of a new building… The liturgy is a permanent workshop.”

Indeed, you would think so, were it not for the missing references, wrote Benofy:

Readers of SC who are not familiar with the liturgical teachings of earlier twentieth-century popes and are not led by footnotes to the documents that explain them will almost certainly see SC as a document with no connection to the recent past. They are thus unable to see SC as the Council Fathers did – as the continuation of reform begun by Saint Pius X.

Not as a license to make it a living document, as many in the U.S. would like to consider the constitution.

“Had even some of these references to documents such as Tra le sollecitudini and Mediator Dei been kept in,” she continued,

it would certainly have been harder to interpret SC with a hermeneutic [interpretation] of rupture and discontinuity.

As it stands, Vatican II’s Liturgy Commission – inadvertently or by design – made it a lot easier for various people to interpret SC as advocating a kind of ‘year zero’ liturgical reform, disconnected from the reforms of the earlier 20th century popes. (Italics mine)

More to come on these behind-scene maneuvers, if that’s what they were, rather than well-meant omissions . . .

Interior life, not to be abandoned in our search for community or commitment to a cause . . .

Instead, mes enfants . . .

“Abandon yourself entirely to the over-ruling of God, and by self-oblivion be eternally occupied in loving and serving Him without any of those fears, reflexions, examens, and anxieties which the affair of our salvation, and perfection sometimes occasion.”

Gold in them there hills . . .

Since God wishes to do all for us, let us place everything in His hands once and for all, leaving them to His infinite wisdom; and trouble no more about anything but what concerns Him. On then, my soul, on with head uplifted above earthly things, always satisfied with God, with everything He does, or makes you do.

Practically speaking . . .

Take good care not to imprudently entertain a crowd of anxious reflexions which, like so many trackless ways, carry our footsteps far and wide until we are hopelessly astray. Let us go through that labyrinth of self-love by leaping over it, instead of traversing its interminable windings. [emphasis added]

From a Jesuit-authored gem . . . 

De Caussade, Jean-Pierre. Abandonment To Divine Providence (Unabridged: with a compilation of the letters of Father Jean-Pierre De Caussade) (p. 37). Neeland Media LLC. Kindle Edition.

Trust me on this?

Idea for introducing yourself to one sitting next you at church before Sunday mass . . .

. . . when the presiding priest or singing director urges you to do so.

Do not just say hi but hand out your card. Something they can take with themselves and maybe later call you and presto, some new business.

Or, and this is a big or, a number or address a person can call or write to later, trying to sell you something.

So forget it, not that it’s ever been tried.

Look. Just say hi and let go at that. With a smile, of course.

It’s what I do at the other greeting time, the handclasp of peace later in the mass, when I sometimes do not clasp a hand but wave, and then not to whole rest of church, of course . . . .

The villainous Bugnini, who made the Ordo Novus, as presented in newly translated book by highly regarded French historian Yves Chiron

Held in low esteem, if any esteem at all, by traditionalists and tradition-leaning Catholics from all over the world.

The general theme of the book [Annibale Bugnini, Reformer of the Liturgy, Angelico Press] could be summed up as this: Bugnini was immensely hard-working and a skilled networker, and in large bureaucracies these are the people who leave their marks upon events.

For better or worse, of course.

Anyhow, the final decree passed in Vatican Council 2 with a mere four dissenters.

However . . .

Sometimes people draw our attention to the fact that only four of the [bishops in attendance] voted against the Conciliar decree Sacrosanctum Concilium. Which is indeed an objective historical fact.

But the leap is sometimes made of implying that everything which has happened since was directly and formally mandated by the Council, so that anybody who expresses a criticism is ‘anti-Conciliar’. This is a very profound error. [emphasis
added]

Indeed, one of the signers-on was a man who led a sharply counter-movement after the council, after the liturgical experts headed by Bugnini had gone to work:

Archbishop Lefebvre [founder of the separatist Society of St. Pius X] signed the Decree. He spent much of his distinguished life resisting the neo-Modernism of the post-Conciliar decades, but in 1965 these were the views he expressed:

“There was something to reform and to rediscover. Clearly, the first part of the Mass, which is intended to instruct the faithful and for them to expresss their faith, needed to reach these ends in a clearer and so to speak more intelligible manner. In my humble opinion, two such reforms seemed useful: first [the reform of?] the rites of that first part and also a few translations into the vernacular.

“The priest coming nearer to the faithful; communicating with them; praying and singing with them and therefore standing in the pulpit; saying the Collect, the Epistle, and the Gospel in their language; the priest singing in the divine traditional melodies the Kyrie, the Gloria, the creed with the faithful: these are so many good reforms that give back to that part of the Mass its true finality.”

Even in early stages of deciding implementation, there was the exchange of the “bold Austrian Jesuit called Hofinger,” who said there should be “no prohibition against changing . . . the Canon,” the hitherto sacrosanct center part of the mass, with his former teacher, the distinguished and learned fellow Jesuit, J A Jungmann, who made the “immediate retort”: “But those changes ought to occur only for the gravest reasons.”

“We need to remember, writes Fr. Z.

. . .  (1) how rapidly the entire landscape was to change. Less than a decade after these comparatively restrained scholarly debates, the Roman Canon had to all intents and purposes ceased to be used and some two or three hundred home-made “Eucharistic Prayers” were, to St Paul VI’s great consternation, in circulation.

And (2), that in 1961, neither the avant-garde, the Hofingers, nor the rear-guard, the Lefebvres, had the faintest, remotest, tiniest idea of where . . . it would all lead.

The beauty of Chiron’s book is that it “enables you to go back in time and to be a fly on the wall as the ‘experts’ . . . edged blindly forward into the quicksands and through the mist.”

The Bugnini effect was yet to be felt in all its suspect glory.

Traditional Latin Mass: A Review of Peter Kwasniewski’s Book ‘Noble Beauty’ | National Review

Too much too soon, contra-Vatican 2, “malleable”:

Disagreement over how the faithful should conduct their liturgy, or public worship, has dogged the Catholic Church for the past 50 years. The reasons are many, but three are especially salient:

-The liturgical changes that were introduced after the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) were sweeping — especially the new Mass, which replaced the centuries-old Latin Mass in 1969. Taken together, the changes to the Mass, the Church calendar, and other features of Catholic liturgy constitute the most extensive alteration that it has ever undergone.

-The liturgical changes of the 1960s were in defiance of both the letter and the spirit of what the bishops had called for at Vatican II: adjustment and reform. What they got instead was a complete revolution, delivered as a fait accompli less than five years after the Council ended.

-Where the traditional liturgy was fixed and regulated, the reformed version — again, the new Mass in particular — is highly malleable. It gives the clergy and their collaborators much greater license to be “creative” and to refashion the Mass (and other rites) for any given occasion, according to their varying tastes.

Other than that, a great idea.

Something stinky about post-Vatican II changes?

Consider the aftermath of an electrifying speech.  (8/28/2017)

In July the Vatican’s divine worship executive made a strong pitch for ad orientem masses (priest facing same direction as people) in a speech in England, was promptly countermanded by a higher-than-he at the Pope’s behest and was called in by the Pope himself.

What was that all about, including the prelate’s being summoned to the papal carpet before being reprimanded?

Well the prelate, Cardinal Robert Sarah, had “touched an ecclesial third rail,” Christian Browne wrote at the time in Crisis Magazine:

It seems that churchmen at the highest levels do not wish anyone to notice that certain practices associated with the Novus Ordo — Mass facing the people, Communion in the hand while standing, the use of laymen to distribute Holy Communion — have no grounding in the Missal of Paul VI, let alone in the mandate for liturgical reform set forth at the Second Vatican Council.

Rather, these practices sprouted up throughout the 1970s as a result of devastating anti-traditional fads that even the radical post-Council crafters of the 1969 Missal never envisioned.

Done with many a wink, many a nod. For the best of reasons, to be sure.

And no grounding? What the . . . ? More later on this aspect of the history of the new mass . . .

THE MASS OF THE ’40S VS. OF TODAY

A CATHOLIC LAMENT, broadly stated:

1. The Latin was mysterious, signalling the (bona fide) mysteries of the Eucharist, vs. today’s liturgical populism, downgrading the mystical and downplaying the sacral.

2. The priest saying Mass was a functionary, reflecting the ex opere operato aspect of what he did.

3. The priest at mass was (presumably) a priest at prayer, absorbed in that aspect, which meant he did not look at or survey people, even when turning to them to pronounce a blessing or solicit response.

4. As functionary or performer of the sacred ritual, he was severely limited. Ritual reigned, ad libbing unheard of.

5. People looked forward and saw the priest facing in the same direction, a crucial element in the transaction but not its focus. (Important point here and now, when the priest has become the focus, people look at him, there being nothing else, presuming they pay attention to what’s going on.)

6. The priest never looked at the people, as noted. It was prayer time, for him and the rest of us, moments of silence and attempted communing with the supernatural.

7. Mass over, church remained a place of prayer, not reverting to a social hall, as if the Sacrament did not remain, ensconced in tabernacle.

8. All in all, there was less or no socializing in church, more or only reverence or at least silence.

It’s different now.