Jackson (Miss.) Diocese priest on Summorum Pontificum

Do we really want to go back? Dear Editor Lex Grandi, Lex Credendi. “Have you ‘heard’ Mass lately?” In recent months I have seen reports of a move in the church to make the Mass of Pope Pius V (Tridentine Mass) more available to the laity. This would include returning to the Mass being “said” by the priest with his back to the people. A recent article on this subject in the Tupelo paper, the Daily Journal, quoted one lay woman who attends this Mass describe the priest as the pilot and the laity as passengers. She said she would not want the pilot flying her plane to be facing the passengers. I have some questions I wish to raise regarding the Mass of Pius V. 1. Does the Mass of Pius V give the worshipper a sense of God’s presence (the holy) among the worshippers gathered or is the “holy” only present on the altar? 2. Does the Mass of Pius V give the worshipper a sense of being gathered together for corporate worship or private, personal devotion? 3. Does the Mass of Pius V help foster in the worshipper a sense of their own priesthood (per baptism) which enables them to offer the Mass with the priest (per ordination)? 4. Does the Mass of Pius V promote in the worshipper a sense of God who is immersed in the world and their life, or a sense of God removed from the world and their life? A God removed from flesh or a God made flesh? 5. Does the Mass of Pius V help convey the bond of intimacy between God and his people intended by the covenant ritual or does it promote a sense of God’s aloofness from his people? One of the most potent tools the church has to catechize both the priests and laity is the way Mass is celebrated, whether that of Pius V or Paul VI. These two forms of the Mass operate from very different theologies. They convey very different ideas about God, Jesus, holiness, priesthood, laity, worship, and spirituality – I believe the Mass of Pius V, with its heavy emphasis on the transcendent nature of God contributed to most Catholics not receiving Holy Communion at Mass. It took Pope Pius X to make it a law of the church for Catholics to receive Holy Communion at least once-a-year for them to be in good standing in the church. I am old enough to remember those days. Do we truly want to go back to an experience of Mass where the priest’s role is described as “saying Mass” and the laity’s role that of “hearing Mass”? “Lex orandi, lex credendi.”

Fair warning: In north Mississippi (as in many places across the South) there are actually more Catholics now than there were 30 or 40 years ago. But almost every city in the state (with the exception of the state capital, Jackson, or along the Miss. Gulf Coast with its traditionally large Catholic population) still has only one parish. Tupelo falls into this category: a steady population swell in the past 10-15 years has brought in many Catholic transplants but there is still only one parish in town so all the Masses on a given Sunday are crowded. So, if you email Fr. Shelton, you can’t really use the argument that Mass attendance has dropped. In my hometown parish (pop. ca. 17,000), we have three Masses every Sunday, each with standing-room-only crowds. And people actually do come and stand!

Just wanted to warn you before you give this guy a straw man argument. ;-)

My local parish is growing, too. But I don't belong to a congregational Church. Mass attendance nationally has plummeted since the new mass was imposed on Catholics. Catholics by the droves have abandoned the Church for the evangelical sects.

I am not among those who attribute some sort of magic to the old Latin rite. Mass attendance overseas was already falling rapidly when Vatican Ii convened. Which is one reason why the Council recommended reforms, including more use of the vernacular. Why we got was revolution, and revolution from above. A one time idol of liberal Catholics, Jacques Maritain, said that no one expected anything more than what happened after 1962 which was a translation of the existing rite into the vernacular. The New Mass was a radical change in the order of service, but that might not have mattered so much if a literal stripping of the altars had no occurred in many churches.

I was never a "fan" of the Italianate features of many Catholic churches. especially the bad art. My personal taste was more inclined to that of "high" Episcopal churches. As to the rite, if I had been in charge, I would have adopted Cranmer's service with "Catholic" revisions to get away from his Calvinist theological assertions. But the literal reforming of many Catholic churches went far beyond those of Cranmer. And it was done without much participation by the laity. In many respects it was an example of the worst excesses of clericalism, by priests determined to be "relevant." As the present pope has said, many of the laity were shocked to see an ancient rite revamped as if it were just some other artificial thing and not one rooted in two thousand years of development. The whole process seemed calculated to produce psychological shock.

If its purpose was to overcome a kind of inertia, to rouse a passive laity to action, one has to admit that, excerpt for a minority, it failed. Or rather, it stirred many to reject their faith as something beyond reform. Many went off into the political radicalism of the ''60s; others went into the fundamentalist sects, which offered them warmth and an errant Bible. In each case, they also obtained a kind of escape from a strict Catholic sexual morality.

One of the modernist canards about the New Mass is that it emphasizes a more "up-to-date" Catholic theology that the Traditional Mass fails to address. But I don't think the Novus Ordo even illustrates the theology it claims to illustrate particularly well:

1. Does the Mass of Pius V give the worshipper a sense of God’s presence (the holy) among the worshippers gathered or is the “holy” only present on the altar?

Does the Mass of Paul VI? Are you kidding me? Have you looked at a typical modern Catholic congregation recently? What "sense of God's presence" is one supposed to get amongst worshippers who come in late to Mass, leave early, dress for Church in ways I wouldn't dress to go to an amusement park, chat, chew gum, have their children scribble with crayons in the pews, and generally behave like their at McDonald's. Whereas one can easily discern God's presence amongst a prayerful, reverent, respectable-looking congregation, as one often finds in a Traditional Latin Mass.

2. Does the Mass of Pius V give the worshipper a sense of being gathered together for corporate worship or private, personal devotion?

Traditionally, there is a great sense of community in a Catholic parish, in which the faithful gather together not only for Mass, but for vigils, processions, pilgrimages, the Rosary, and countless other devotions, in which adhere to the same beliefs and pious customs, in addition to private devotions. In addition, the parish itself is connected to the Catholic Church and the Catholic community across the world. The post-conciliar chaos swept much of that, opting for an experimentalism that scattered the us in every direction. Modern Catholics have little connection to each other in either practice or belief, since they all believe and practice completely different things! But because they're forced to shake each others' sweaty hands in the middle of Mass on the rare occasions that they even go to Mass, we're supposed to believe we now have a more "corporate" worship. Typical liberal obsession with cheap token gestures over real substance.

3. Does the Mass of Pius V help foster in the worshipper a sense of their own priesthood (per baptism) which enables them to offer the Mass with the priest (per ordination)?

Really, how many congregants actually "participate" in the Mass in the sense that the modernists want them too? Most people I see at Mass are hardly even paying attention. Most parishes have a small clique of laity (mostly aging women) who do participate by running everything, and they do see themselves as priests (and are angry that they can't actually be priests). Everyone else sits around and goes with the banal flow. So much for the Novus Ordo's "priesthood of the faithful."

4. Does the Mass of Pius V promote in the worshipper a sense of God who is immersed in the world and their life, or a sense of God removed from the world and their life? A God removed from flesh or a God made flesh?

How deeply did the typical self-described Catholic practice his faith in 1940, compared with the typical self-described Catholic now? Traditional Catholic theology teaches that every Catholic should imbue his life with the grace and virtue of God and the Mass was the primary source of spiritual nourishment to go into the World and do so. Now most Catholics I know, you wouldn't even know were Catholic or even Christian except that they go to Mass on occasion.

5. Does the Mass of Pius V help convey the bond of intimacy between God and his people intended by the covenant ritual or does it promote a sense of God’s aloofness from his people?

The act of taking Holy Communion is the most intimate act a human being can experience with God, the he can only truly sense this if he truly believe the the Host is the Body of Christ. The sense of reverence and transcendence in the Traditional Mass helped buttress the congregant's belief. The banality and secularism of the New Mass, as commonly performed, strips this away. And how can one experience intimacy with God when one is already engaged in all this supposed "community participation" you keep talking about? In fact the Catholic Tradition is better than unCatholic modernism at all these things the priest mentioned and it's not hard to see why, given that Catholicism is structured according to the truths of God and modernism is absolutely not. But if you don't believe that, you should at least believe that the proof is in the pudding. And yet priests like this can look out upon a thin and thinning congregation disconnected, poorly-dressed slobs and bored grey-heads and say to themselves "Now, they're actively engaged!"

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