Posted on 06/19/2005 9:33:26 PM PDT by Lady In Blue
Pope set to return to traditional liturgy:-
VATICAN CITY | June 19, 2005 5:11:27 AM IST
Pope Benedict XVI wants to restore the traditional ceremonial Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, with Latin instead of the vernacular and Gregorian chants.
Vatican expert Sandro Magister reported in his weekly newsletter Saturday that the pope is expected to replace Archbishop Pietro Marini, his predecessor Pope John Paul II's master of liturgical ceremonies.
Whoever follows Marini will have orders to restore the traditional style and choreography of papal ceremonies in St. Peter's.
Out will go the international Masses so dear to Pope John Paul II's heart, with such innovations as Latin American and African rhythms and even dancing, multi-lingual readings and children in national costumes bringing gifts to the altar.
Pope Benedict wants to return to the Sistine Chapel choirs singing Gregorian chant and the church music of such composers as Claudio Monteverdi from the 17th century. He also wants to revive the Latin Mass.
Archbishop Marini always planned the ceremonies with television in mind, Magister said, and that emphasis will remain. A decade ago the Vatican set up a system for transmitting papal ceremonies world wide via multiple satellites.
(UPI)
Get off of your high horse BE I have NEVER attended an SSPX
Mass as though it were relevant to my post.
Call me when you have something better to offer than ad hominem.
Not only a loud-mouth, but a coward, too.
Figures.
Law doesn't deserve to be even a pastor of a parish church.
"I prefer this somewhat free poetic translation with its rhyming meter:"
I guess that's why they say, "De gustibus non disputandum est."
Solely as a matter of taste, that translation...trying to think...no, I gotta say it. It grosses me out. Matter of taste, I know, but it just grosses me out.
If it has to be translated into a poetic form, it should be after the style of Robert Service.
I'm going to keep saying it in Latin.
""Salve Regina" then means essentially "Save us O Queen" or "O Queen you are our Salvation"
Okay, as I said I'm no Latin scholar. However, I did look it up. Here's what I found:
salv.e ADJ 1 1 VOC S M POS
salvus, salva, salvum ADJ [XXXAX]
well, unharmed, sound; alive; safe, saved;
salv.e V 2 1 PRES ACTIVE IMP 2 S
salveo, salvere, -, - V [XXXBX]
be well/in good health; [salve => hello/hail/greetings; farewell/goodbye];
salve ADV POS
salve ADV [XXXCX]
hail!/welcome!; farewell!; [salvere jubere => to greet/bid good day];
So, of all those possibilities, which is correct?
To translate "salve Regina" as "Save us O Queen" or "O Queen you are our Salvation" seems to me incorrect theology.
Our Lady is not our Salvation. Our Lord is our Salvation. Our Lady intervenes for us and obtains Graces for us, but she cannot save us and is not our Salvation.
Therefore, I think that "salve" is used as a greeting here, rather than in the way you suggest.
"He thinks we are *insisting* that a Mass has to be in Latin for it to be valid/spiritually beneficial, and I want to make it clear to him and every one else that that is *not at all* reflective of Catholic thinking."
Oh, I see. Yes, you're correct.
I've always believed God mostly works through his people. Prayer and action is an unbeatable combination.
Yes, B16 should be attending to the liturgical side of the Church, but he should also be ridding our Church of the poofters and child abusers that have done Roman Catholicism so much harm. He should also be actively encouraging EVERY Catholic to blockade and close the abortuaries.
I applaud your efforts in representing those outstanding men and woman who put themselves between the babies and the killers. I pray every day that the Lord will give us all the strength to do likewise.
What happened to this perfectly innocuous thread? Why has it been moved to the Smokey Back room? Do you know?
Our Lady is not our Salvation. Our Lord is our Salvation. Our Lady intervenes for us and obtains Graces for us, but she cannot save us and is not our Salvation.
In as much as Christ has made St. Mary our Mediatrix of All Graces, she is our salvation. The translation I proposed is entirely apropos, and goes directly to the heart of what is meant by "Salve" and "Hail", which is not "Hello!", which is why the word "Ave" was not used.
"Through the prayers of the Mother of God, O Savior save us!" (Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, First Antiphon)
"O most holy Mother of God, save us!" (Akathist Hymn)
"If anyone shall not confess the holy ever-virgin Mary, truly and properly the Mother of God, to be higher than every creature whether visible or invisible, and does not with sincere faith seek her intercessions as of one having confidence in her access to our God, since she bare him, let him be anathema." (Second Council of Nicaea, Canon 15)
Dubyaismypresident already gave some good reasons in post 276, but some historical context might help as well. In A.D. 500, the Latin Mass was a vernacular Mass, because most western Christians spoke Vulgar Latin. And then you had the barbarian invasions, and with them came languages like Gothic, etc. Gothic translations of the Bible were in fact made (one famous one by Wulfilas). But as those barbarians Romanized, Latin still remained the language of law and scholarship, and religion as well. Then gradually, as you said, Vulgar Latin in the various regions began the shift to Italian, French, Spanish, etc. So it wasn't so much that the Roman Church *decided* to have an archaic language at its heart, it's more that the vernacular language it had always used slipped out of usage everywhere else.
On the clergy not encouraging people to read the Bible part--that's a mistaken characterization. Vernacular bibles were always available, but before printing were fantastically expensive and nothing your average peasant Christian could afford (if they could read at all). Thanks to Gutenberg they were more available, but during the Reformation the Church got really touchy about bad translations getting propagated and falling into people's hands. That's where the greater restrictions came in, but I believe it pertained more to people *printing* and translating Bibles than owning them, which has always been encouraged.
2. I believe that I responded to your post fully. If not, let me know the specifics.
3. Bernardin was about the worst figure in the history of AmChurch surpassing even Law.
4. I am very comfortable on my high horse and intend to remain there.
5. I have posted plenty here on the phoniness that often passes for "tradition" on the part of those who want to either wring their hands over every nuance (Did Marcel get a fair hearing? Did JP II exceed his authority? Yeah, that's the ticket!) or reject the authority as exercised by the late Holy Father.
6. Ad hominem is Latin for "We know them when we hear from them." They usually don't answer simple questions for obvious reasons. I invited your substantive answers. You decided to keep the argument ad hominem.
If it was irrelevant to both of our posts, why did YOU bring it up?
I don't live in Chicagoland. I live in rural Northwestern Illinois in the Rockford diocese of Bishop Doran. I live in a relatively narrow circle of friends, none of whom seem to have regarded Bernardin as other than the worst archbishop Chicago ever had and as one who dictated that the music at his funeral be done by the Windy City Gay Men's Chorus to send an obvious message.
Bernardin was about the worst figure in the history of AmChurch surpassing even Law.
We're in the same diocese, funny how you never got wind of how many folks around Chicagoland think of Bernardin the way you think of John Paul the Great. Even the good folks at the Rockford Institute seem to grasp that fact.
6. Ad hominem is Latin for "We know them when we hear from them." They usually don't answer simple questions for obvious reasons. I invited your substantive answers. You decided to keep the argument ad hominem.
I see your latin is about as good as your rhetoric.
I don't confuse myself with God but then I am not and never was SSPX.
Few know Lefebvre's name. Few ever will, as it should be.
Did Marcel Lefebvre die excommunicated?
Was Marcel Lefebvre ever excommunicated?
Same questions as to the Econe 4 Is SSPX in schism? Why? Why not?
Get back to me when you have answered those.
This is all from your post to me. I never mentioned Lefebvre, the SSPX or anything against the authority of the Pope. Do you really expect that I should NOT have taken this post as an implication that I was somehow schismatic? Please.
I have been judging since I was about 5 years old (oh, so many years ago) and generally I have hit the right targets. If someone shows me I am wrong, I generally admit it.
So far you seem to have hit myself and one other poster on this forum with implicit charges of schismaticism. You are not admitting that you're wrong, on the contrary, you seem to have arrogantly dug your heels in.
I invited your substantive answers. You decided to keep the argument ad hominem.
I honestly do NOT even know what you are refering to. I merely told you to not indulge in ad hominem arguments such as wrongly implying that persons on this thread are schismatic. If my telling you that constitutes an ad hominem argument then I'll just have to find out what passes for logic out there in Rockford.
Thanks for the ping.
As an Orthodox Christian, I of course think that maintaining texts of liturgical services in an unbroken tradition is vital. The N.O. masses radically broke that tradition. It is not that liturgical services can't change -- they most obviously can, do, and must. Our "fossilized" services have undergone many small changes around the periphery -- particularly additions.
But genuine changes happen so slowly as to be perceptible only by looking back across centuries. The N.O. was a radical break in the actual texts -- the only place such a thing had happened before in Christendom was during the Protestant Reformation.
As an Orthodox Christian, I also believe that liturgy must be in a liturgical dialect close enough to the vernacular that it can be a natural language of prayer with minimal effort. To me, the Latin mass falls flat on its face on those grounds. Native Italian or Spanish-speakers, maybe. Irish, Germans, Americans.... Chinese?
This sets up a real class-system, in terms of who can really learn, memorize, and digest the services. There have been times when liturgical languages with no relation to the native languages have been imposed in the Orthodox world: Greek imposed for a time in Arabic-speaking countries and in Bulgaria under the Ottomans, Slavonic being standard-issue in Romania for a time. It didn't have good spiritual effects.
Reading a libretto and becoming familiar with a foreign language just isn't the same. This move to the vernacular was something very positive about Vat II for Catholics. I can only regret that for some reason that English tranlations use a very tin-eared version of the language, and seemingly deliberately mistranslated certain things.
As an Orthodox Christian, not only the words must be part of an unbroken tradition, but also liturgical action (e.g. is the priest facing the same direction that Christian priests faced for 2 millenia?), vestments, iconography, chant traditions, architecture... must be part of an unbroken tradition. Again, what I see in N.O. parishes on these scores is sorely lacking. There were radical changes and breaks after Vatican II that really had no precedent.
What is interesting is that in the attempt to make the Mass more "accessible," it seems to have actually been made more complex -- so many choices, so many options, so many variations on liturgical action at the discretion of the priest. There should be one core text of the Liturgy, with the only variations being the propers of the feasts and seasons.
Anyway, those are my observations from the outside. I think that from what I have read of B16's writings, he would favor a traditionally served mass in good vernacular, with a text based on that of the Tridentine, but reformed according to the lights of Vatican II. His writings certainly indicate that he would dearly love to turn around and face the right direction when serving... But he of course understands that one radical upheaval in a generation is probably one too many, and adding another wouldn't necessarily be good. I suspect he will little by little lead by example.
“In as much as Christ has made St. Mary our Mediatrix of All Graces, she is our salvation.”
How can that which stands between us and our Salvation be our Salvation? I don’t see that your conclusion logically or theologically follows from your premise.
I note that two of your three quotations seem to undermine your position:
“Through the prayers of the Mother of God, O Savior save us!” (Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, First Antiphon)
Surely the Saint is asking Our Lord to save him through the prayers of the Blessed Virgin, and not asking the Blessed Virgin to save him.
"…and does not with sincere faith seek her intercessions as of one having confidence in her access to our God…”
Yes, her intercession. She intercedes for us with Our Lord, who is our Salvation. I don’t see how that makes her our Salvation.
Hebrew remained the language of worship and of study for Jews during the 2000 years in which it was not a spoken language in the required sense. In fact, I believe many very Orthodox Jews were against its revival as a spoken language. The so-called Jewish Enlightment of the 19th century foresaw a revival of the Jewish state but many did not want Hebrew to be its language (some thought it too barbaric, and preferred -- ironically enough -- German).
Re the revival of Hebrew: try googling Eliezer ben-Yehuda.
The difference is probably roughly comparable to that between the English of Shakespeare's time (not in modernized texts) and present-day English.
By at least the 8th century, English -- though its roots are Germanic -- was a distinct language. Nu we sculon herian heofon-rices weard is no longer German -- it's English.
Parchment manuscripts were indeed "fantastically expensive," but printed books in the time of Shakespeare were by no means cheap: remember hand-set type, and each page pressed individually (the facsimile edition of Shakespeare's first folio shows hand corrections on several pages because it would be too wasteful to throw away a whole page!). By then, too, they had linen paper -- a long, messy process before the Industrial Revolution.
It wasn't until a method for making paper from wood pulp was developed in the 18th century that book ownership spread significantly beyond the wealthy.
In both the old (Tridentine) mass and the new (novus Ordo) mass, the scripture readings are always in the vernacular.
Even when the Novus Ordo is elebrated in latin - which hardly every happens - only the fixed parts are in Latin. Never the scripture readings.
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