I rest my case. If anything, it is comforting to know that, at least for now, the re-introduction of the TLM is being observed with proper reverence and respect. It is because of the above commentary, that it should never become the norm.
I am so enthralled with the Maronite Divine Liturgy that I wonder why catholics are not beating down the doors to get into this tiny parish church. The obvious answer is that they are comfortable where they are and have no intentions of leaving.
We can all offer up a 'sales pitch' in support of our favorite liturgy but it must be embraced in order to have the same effect. One of the most awesome aspects of the One, Holy, Catholic Church, is its diversity. With 22 different traditions and 8 liturgies, surely all of us can find the reverence we seek.
Excerpted from "Reflections on the Liturgy" a talk held at the canonically recognized Fontgombault Abbey.
http://www.unavoce.org/articles/2001/reflections_on_liturgical_reform.html
The secularization of the liturgy
The Mass, which is the sacred action par excellence, has always been regulated by a rite, which is to say, its ordo, according to the words of Saint Augustine: "totum agendi ordinem, quem universa per orbem servat Ecclesia." With the liturgical reform, the essence of the Sacrament which remains valid and retains its efficacy, did not change, but, according to the expression of Cardinal Ratzinger, a new rite was "fabricated" ex novo.
The rite, of which the classic definition goes back to Servio (Mos institutus religiosis caeremoniis consecratus), is not in fact the sacred action but the norm which guides the unfolding of this action. It can be defined as the whole of the formulas and practical norms which must be observed in order to accomplish a specific liturgical function, even if the term sometimes has a broader meaning and designates a family of rites (Roman, Greek, Ambrosian). It is for that reason that if the sacraments, in their essence, are immutable, the rites themselves can vary according to peoples and times.
In theory, the Novus Ordo of Paul VI established a collection of norms and prayers which regulated the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in place of the ancient Roman rite; in fact, the liturgical praxis revealed that one found oneself with a new protean rite. In the course of the reform a whole series of novelties and variations were progressively introduced, a certain number of which were foreseen neither by the Council nor by the constitution Missale Romanum of Paul VI.
The quid novum would not know how to limit itself to the substitution of the vulgar languages for Latin. It consists equally in the will to conceive the altar as a "table," in order to underline the aspect of the banquet in place of the sacrifice; in the celebratio versus populum, substituted for versus Deum, with, as a consequence, the abandonment of the celebration toward the East, which is to say toward Christ symbolized by the rising sun; in the absence of silence and of recollection during the ceremony and in the theatricality of the celebration accompanied often by songs which tend to desacralize a Mass in which the priest is often reduced to the role of "president of the assembly"; in the hypertrophy of the liturgy of the Word in comparison to the Eucharistic liturgy; in the "sign" of peace which replaces the genuflections of the priest and the faithful, as a symbolic action of the passage in the liturgical action from the vertical dimension to the horizontal; in Holy Communion received by the faithful standing and in the hand; in the access of women to the altar; in concelebration, tending to the "collectivization" of the rite. It consists above all and finally in the change and substitution of the prayers of the Offertory and of the Canon. The elimination in particular of the words Mysterium Fidei from the Eucharistic formula, can be considered, as Cardinal Stickler observed, as a symbol of the demythification and so the humanization of the central core of Holy Mass.
The main theme of these innovations can be expressed in the thesis according to which if we want to render faith in Christ accessible to the man of today, we must live and present this faith to the interior of contemporary thinking and mentality. The traditional liturgy, by its incapacity to adapt itself to the contemporary mentality, distances man from God and renders itself guilty of the loss of God in our society. The reform proposed to adapt the Rite, break down the essence of the Sacrament, in order to permit the Christian community this "participation in the sacred" which cannot be grasped through the traditional liturgy.
Thanks to the principle of participatio actuosa, the entire community becomes subject and bearer of the liturgical action. "The phrase 'active participation,' apparently so modest, complete and conscious, is an indication of an unlooked-for background," observes Fr. Angelus Häussling, in stressing the connection between the participatio actuosa of the liturgical reform and that which, in the school of Karl Rahner, has been called the "anthropological turn" (anthropologische Wende) of theology.
It does not seem excessive to affirm that the participatio actuosa of the community appears to be the ultimate criterion of the liturgical reform from the perspective of a radical secularization of the liturgy. Such a secularization consists of the extinction of the Sacrifice, the sacred action par excellence, which will be replaced by the profane action of the community that glories in itself, or, according to the words of Urs von Balthasar, aims to respond to the praise of the Grace of God with a "counter-glory" purely human.
It is not truly the priest, in persona Christi, that is to say God Himself, who acts, but the community of the faithful, in persona hominis, in order to represent the exigencies of this modern world which a disciple of Rahner defines "as holy and sanctified in its profane state, that is to say holy under the form of anonymity." Opposed to a "divine, sacred, and plurisecular Word" which has as a consequence "a liturgy regarded as sacred and separated from life," is a Word of God which "is not pure revelation, but also action: it realizes that which it manifests"; it is "the absolute self-realization of the Church."
The distinction, proposed by Rahner, between the "secularization" which must be positively admitted as an inevitable phenomenon, and the anti-Christian "secularism," which would only be a form deviating from secularization, is captious. In fact, the word secularization, while having a number of different senses, is commonly understood to be the same as secularism, as an irreversible process of "mundanization" of a reality which is progressively liberated from all its transcendent and metaphysical aspects.
This secularization presents itself in fact not only as a de facto acceptance of the continuing secularization of the present-day world, but also as the idea of a process that is irreversible, and, insofar as it is irreversible, true. This secularization is "true" because the truth is in every way immanent in history; the sacred is "false" because of its illusion of transcending history and of affirming a qualitative distinction between the faith and the world, between transcendent and transcendental. Faith in the power of history thus takes the place of faith in Providence and in the power of God. This philosophy of history is founded on the myth, proper to illuminism, of the world become "adult" which must liberate itself from the values of the past, recovering from the childhood of humanity, in order to attain to a level of life entirely rational. Such a vision has found a rigorous expression in Protestant thought, especially in the thesis of Bonhoeffer on the so-called "maturity of the world." (Mündigkeit der Welt), a maturity which one attains with the elimination of the sacred from life, in all its dimensions. This maturity has been carried to its ultimate coherence by Gramscian Marxism, which represented the development in the twentieth century of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and secularism's point of arrival as radical immanentism. Progressive theology, especially after the Council, wanted to replace traditional philosophy with "modern" philosophy, in subordinating itself inevitably to Marxism. The latter represented for Catholic progressivism the first philosophy that had succeeded in transporting its criterion of truth into praxis and which, in the success of this praxis, seemed to demonstrate the truth of its thought.
The affinity between the theological vision of Tyrrell, founded on the primacy of lex orandi over lex credendi, and the concept of the "self-realization" of the Church in the pastoral and in the liturgy of Karl Rahner, has been remarked. However, the authorities of the first modernism were developed by progressive theology from within the perspective of thought which is no longer simply positivist but Marxist, a perspective of thought that puts the finishing touches to a process judged necessary, which sinks its roots into the philosophy of the Enlightenment and into Protestantism, and further still, into the intellectual movement that put an end to medieval society. "The philosophy of praxis," according to Gransci, "is the crowning achievement of all this movement of intellectual and moral reform; ... it corresponds to the link Protestant + French Revolution."
The philosophy of Gramscian praxis, retranscribed theologically, leads to the necessity of a new praxis orandi. The liturgical reform presents itself then as the Word of the new theology which takes flesh, that is to say praxis, in "self-realizing" the Church by the new secularized liturgy.
"I am so enthralled with the Maronite Divine Liturgy that I wonder why catholics are not beating down the doors to get into this tiny parish church."
I would say the same thing about my parish and the Byzantine rite liturgy.
Folks, you'll just have to excuse me, but I just can't work up the energy to get into a heated debate over which Catholic liturgies are more or less preferable (or pious) when I go by hundreds of people each day who have no faith and little hope.
I'm going to speculate for a moment here. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the folks who are posting on this thread are people who have had some sort of faith throughout their lives. Most if not all were Baptized as children, and had at least some sort of religious education.
I come from a different experience. I grew up with no faith. My religious education, if you can call it such, was courtesy of CBS, NBC, and ABC. The fact that I came into the Catholic church in the first place is something of a miracle. If anyone ever discussed the basic aspects of the Catholic faith with me, I sure don't remember it. And I never, ever had the experience of meeting a Catholic evangelist. I met lots of Mormon evangelists, though.
So I look back, and I have to wonder: so where *were* all those would-be Catholic evangelists that I never had the privilege of meeting? There were plenty of Catholic churches in the area where I grew up.
You think that perhaps they were too busy debating the relative merits of the Novus Ordo or Tridentine Latin Mass to be bothered with evangelizing the hoi poloi such as myself?