Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

. . . yes, the evil one, as the man from Tarsus makes much of while calling for prayers from his flock.

Brothers and sisters: Draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the Devil.

Yes . . .

For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens.

We should (calmly) think on that. It’s us against the second-most-powerful person in creation, lurking everywhere to catch us and do us in.

“Put on the armor of God,” the apostle writes, “that you may . . . resist on the evil day and . . . hold your ground.”

Suit up. Trouble ahead.

. . . stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the Gospel of peace.

In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the Evil One.

Catch the rest of it here. Meanwhile. keep in mind two things: There is an evil force in the universe and there is a shield to deal with his flaming arrows.

I had an exchange aeons ago about this devil business, actually on his counterparts, angels — the St. Michaels of the universe — with a young man who dropped in on the rectory where I lived in an Iowa town during my ordination summer, 1963. How we got around to it, I don’t recall, but I do recall his being surprised that I believed in angels.

Sure, I said. Actually, I took them for granted, ever since I prayed “Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide” — one of the first prayers I learned eighty-some years ago.

I wasn’t shocked to hear the young man’s reaction, but recalling it reminds me of the loss or weakening of such an article of faith among us, where Satan is a comic punch line or even where it’s become a scary thing we’d rather not talk about.

Heck with all that, point is what we do about this devil-take-the-hindmost business. We need no prompting, I think, that believers as we are, we buy into the existence of this malevolent creature, the classic case of bigger they are, the harder they fall — Corruptio optimi pessima in the super mother tongue —  Satan and his fellow damned-forever villainous co-conspirators cum saboteurs.

Read the day’s newspapers and see, something’s radically wrong about the world. By accident? Thinking people, including believers, know better than that, do we not? No, not by accident but by villainous creatures, against whom we dreadfully need divine help.

WHICH IS EVER AT HAND!

End of rant. Now go and do what Paul says. Please.

No mass today. Someone didn’t show up and know what? I did not miss it. Had been meditating 15 minutes up to the announcement, to good effect I might add, what I could not have done once the yelling and moving about started, the back and forth, up and down of the Mass of Now.

You can use The Psalms, New Catholic version, St. Joseph edition (Catholic Book Publishing, 2004). If that be a sales pitch, so be it.

Tell you how I use it. Say the presider of the day is off his game. Not up to his usual top-notch clarity of sound, correctness of pronunciation, accuracy of emphasis, all-’round perspicacity, has become something of a distraction. Not coming through in the way we like, not cutting the mustard from the stage, I mean altar table, from which he presides.

Suppose all of it. What to do? Worshiper wants to stay abreast, does he not? He has delivered the body and wants the whole experience, more important — much more — he owes his full attention as far as possible to what’s happening and does not want to wake up after five or ten minutes of God knows what, having to pull himself together.

No. What he wants, what he needs, is a counter-distraction, which is where Psalms come in. This book is not the only counter-distraction device — prime among others being the Rosary, of course — but it’s a very good vehicle for holy thinking to accompany, not to blot out, the super-holy activity of the moment.

It can be done. You take in the one without blotting out the other and away you go. Try it, you’ll like it.

Case in point

Consider beginning at the start of the God-blessed book. I have done so, to good effect.

The first Psalm, short and to the point, asks what kind of man is blessed and answers, one who “does not guide his steps by ill counsel, or turn aside where sinners walk, or, where scornful souls gather.”

Stay away from know-it-all wiseguys.

Instead be truly wise, one “whose heart is set day and night on the law of the Lord.”

Keep God in mind.

This good guy “stands firm as a tree planted by running water, ready to yield its fruit when the season comes, not a leaf faded; all that he does will prosper.”

Let’s hear it, fellows and gals.

Their counterpart? “the wicked,” who “like chaff the wind sweeps away.”

Fly-by-nights . . .

. . . who “when judgement comes, to rise and plead their cause . . . will have no [role] in the reunion of the just.”

The just, en contraire, “walk . . . under the Lord’s protection.”

The wicked? They are “soon lost to sight!”

It’s the psalmist’s world, carrying a heap of — God bless us all — rock-bottom, heart-of-the-matter doctrine.

See this book of poetry as 150 stirring units — poems or chapters if you please — with a philosophy and more than that, a series of instructions on how to live.

Unparallelled in the Judaeo-Christian heritage.

Now, for unadulterated reading, here’s this first Psalm in its Knox translation.

1 Blessed is the man who does not guide his steps by ill counsel, or turn aside where sinners walk, or, where scornful souls gather, sit down to rest;

2 the man whose heart is set on the law of the Lord, on that law, day and night, his thoughts still dwell.

3 He stands firm as a tree planted by running water, ready to yield its fruit when the season comes, not a leaf faded; all that he does will prosper.

4 Not such, not such the wicked; the wicked are like chaff the wind sweeps away.

5 Not for the wicked, when judgement comes, to rise up and plead their cause; sinners will have no part in the reunion of the just.

6 They walk, the just, under the Lord’s protection; the path of the wicked, how soon is it lost to sight!

I love the rhythm of it, the richness of its figures. 150 of them, as it happens, such a gift from our Judaeo-Christian tradition.

. . . reviewed at the time by the late Paul Likoudis:

The unprecedented manner in which Pope Paul VI imposed the Novus Ordo of the Mass created tragic consequences for the Roman Catholic Church, says Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in his new autobiography.

Speaking boldly, like a private citizen, before holding elective office.

Not only did the banning of the old Mass represent a severe departure from tradition, but the revolutionary manner in which the new Mass was imposed has created the impression that liturgy is something each community creates on its own, not something which “is given.”

Not Paul’s finest hour.

Rather than being a force for unity in the Church, the new Mass has been the source of liturgical anarchy, dividing Catholics “into opposing party positions” and creating a situation in which the Church is “lacerating herself.”

Tough language.

Formally imposed after a six-month period of “liturgical experimentation” in which anything -and everything-did go, the Roman Catholic Mass has never attained a universality, stability-or even an element of predictability — for most Catholics around the world; but instead has been a stimulus for never-ending innovations-from altar girls to dancing girls to women priests.

See or have seen the first and second, not the third.

While the Missal of Paul VI “brought with it some authentic improvements and a real enrichment,” the banning of the old Mass caused some “extremely serious damages for us,” he wrote in La Mia Vita, released in mid-April in its Italian translation.

Here’s the nub, the banning.

“I was dismayed by the banning of the old Missal,” he wrote, “seeing that a similar thing had never happened in the entire history of the liturgy….

A blot on the historical landscape?

“The promulgation of the banning of the Missal that had been developed in the course of centuries. starting from the time of the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, has brought with it a break in the history of the liturgy whose consequences could be tragic…. The old structure was broken to pieces and another was constructed admittedly with material of which the old structure had been made and using also the preceding models….

But . . .

“. . . the fact that [the liturgy] was presented as a new structure, set up against what had been formed in the course of history and was now prohibited, and that the liturgy was made to appear in some ways no longer as a living process but as a product of specialized knowledge and juridical competence, has brought with it some extremely serious damages for us.

A manufactured product.

“In this way, in fact, the impression has arisen that the liturgy is ‘made,’ that it is not something that exists before us, something ‘given,’ but that it depends on our decisions.

It follows as a consequence that this decision-making capacity is recognized not only in specialists or in a central authority, but that, in the final analysis, each ‘community’ wants to give itself its own liturgy.

Gallicanism?

But when the liturgy is something each one makes by himself, then it no longer gives us what is its true quality: encounter with the mystery which is not our product but our origin and the wellspring of our life….

The sort of thing you cherish.

He carries the idea further.

“I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis [!] in which we find ourselves depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy, which at times is actually being conceived of etsi Deus non daretur: as though in the liturgy it did not matter any more whether God exists and whether He speaks to us and listens to us.

A sort of navel-gazing?

“But if in the liturgy the communion of faith no longer appears . . . where [does] the Church appear in her spiritual substance?,” he asked.

The spiritual gets downplayed or left out.

Too often, Ratzinger lamented, “the community is only celebrating itself without its being worthwhile to do so.”

Waste of time, he’s saying. You can do that at a birthday party.

He’d already said things like this.

On at least two other occasions, Cardinal Ratzinger has criticized specific liturgical abuses [at] other highly publicized events, [where] he has praised the beauty of the old Mass.

But this newly released autobiography is “the first prolonged lament over the wholesale replacement of one liturgy with another.”

In 1969, in his General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Paul VI revised the the Mass and related prayers and banned, with few exceptions, the Mass rite, effective after a transition period of several months.”

The die was cast.

The Mass had undergone “evolutionary changes” throughout history, but always with a sense of “continuity,” Ratzinger wrote, including when Pius V, after reworking the Missal in 1570 following the Council of Trent, allowed for continued use of some liturgies “with centuries-long traditions.”

Not this time, and aiming at recoverying that sense of continuity, he called for “a new liturgical movement to call back to life the true heritage of Vatican Council II.”

“It is dramatically urgent,” he wrote, “to have a renewal of liturgical awareness” and “understands Vatican II not as a break, but as a developing moment.“

Few talk that way in our day. Quite the contrary.

A `vertical’ approach

The more than 400-year-old Latin Tridentine mass (established by the counter-reformation Council of Trent) is “the true mass,” [said worshiper Miguel Garcia]. “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.”

— End of story —

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 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.

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.”

— To be concluded: Part 2 coming up —