Pope Names New Bishops for TX and LA (the state, not the city)

St. Ben's was kind of a barn, too, but it had a parish hall and an education building. I don't suppose they'd trade for St. Luke's facility; we'd probably have to do a three-way swap with a parish somewhere that all the parishioners have moved away, leaving empty buildings.

Maybe we could investigate buying one of those beautiful, vacant Austrian Churches that we could then put together block by block. It would keep the kids busy for years and then they wouldn't have to hang from ceilings dusting "ornamento" while dressed like cherubs (red eyes and all). Anoreth could be on-site commander.

Sounds like a great idea!

Is St. Benedict's of Broken Arrow also known as Clear Creek and run by French Benedictines?

Also, you are a lot younger than I and you are a convert. To appreciate the Tridentine norm in Catholicism, one must devote some time to living it. You may not choose to do so but I hope you do.

God bless you and yours in any event.

No, the Clear Creek monastic foundation is out in the sticks, and is encouraged by the Diocese of Tulsa but not immediately under its direction.

St. Benedict's is a large, suburban parish on the southeastern side of the Tulsa metropolitan area. (Such as it is :-).

And truly everyone's experience is different. I have always believed that the Tridentine Mass should be available for those who want it.

Don't forget the Diocese of Tyler (East Texas). While I don't know very much about the Bishop, he has appointed numerous priests from India throughout the diocese, including to the church near our farm. I can't understand the pastor, and it is especially trying when going to confession as I can't understand his counsel. He says something (a prayer?) at the same time I am saying the Act of Contrition, and as a consequence, I never hear the words of Absolution. It makes me wonder if I've even been absolved! I can only imagine that if I have this kind of trouble understanding him, how much more so those who speak Spanish. It just doesn't seem right ...

If one reads Pope Saint Pius V's QUO PRIMUM, he or she would know that no priest can ever be obligated by anyone to do a mass other than the canonized Catholic Mass--the Traditional Latin Mass. No one can legally forbid the Traditional Latin Mass; it is THE Catholic Mass. Besides, the Novus Ordo mass is strangely similar to what Cranmer and Luther did.

Pope St. Pius V had many virtues but he lacked the authority to bind his successors on matters liturgical as he purported to do in Quo Primum. It would be beyond his power (ultra vires) in the same sense as it would have been beyond his power to say that the palace in which he lived would be the only place where any of bis successors could live as a reaction to the Avignon "Babylonian captivity" of the papacy which, in its time, gave French monarchs more influence than was likely prudent over the Church.

Pope St. Pius V was making order out of chaos liturgically in response to the reformation. He arbitrarily eliminated many traditional liturgies and many other liturgies in favor of the Tridentine but he also exempted the Ambrosian Rite of his Dominican Order and a few others from the elimination of liturgies. Luther had continued to preside over services that bore resemblance to Masses of his time, despite his heresies. The pope had to act in response to that but that situation, however grave, did not freeze history so that there would never be any non-reformation challenges to the Church liturgically.

In our own time, four decades into an improvident "reform" of the liturgy that has opened a door to many liturgical abuses, it is tempting for those of us who favor (as I certainly do) the Tridentine Rite (or the Dominican Ambrosian Rite for that matter) to look back at Quo Primum as the solution to all problems liturgical and to say that Pope Paul VI MUST have been in some sort of doctrinal error to ignore Quo Primum and to somehow disobey Pope St. Pius V's injunction that the Tridentine is "the one, the final missal of the Roman Catholic Church." I harbor little fondness for many of the papal works of either John XXIII or of Paul VI but each was pope and each had the power of the keys, as did John Paul I, John Paul II and Benedict XV after them.

Suppose that John Paul I lived longer and that he was, as alleged by some but never proven, planning to restore the Tridentine. Suppose further that John Paul I wanted to retain only one change, the addition of the schedule of Old Testament readings in the vernacular which Paul VI had added in promulgating the Novus Ordo. Would he have lacked the papal authority to do that simply because Pope St. Pius V had issued Quo Primum? Did Pope Leo XIII violate Quo Primum or sin by adding the St. Michael prayer to the prayers at the foot of the altar at the end of Mass? Would any pope lack the authority to add the rosary to the Mass between the sermon and the Creed? Or to add reference to the Immaculate Conception (formally defined by Pope Pis IX about 300 years after Quo Primum)? No, in all cases.

To imagine that Pope St. Pius V had such authority to bind his successors so tightly on matters of liturgy is to endorse the concept of ever diminishing papal prerogative and ever diminishing papal authority. It is one thing to say that the Immaculate Conception is now doctrine, now dogma, that (Pius XII) the Assumption of Mary body and soul into heaven is now doctrine, now dogma. It is one thing to say that transubstantiation and not consubstantiation is what occurs at Mass. It is quite another to imagine that the authority of the papacy can be exercised to bind every detail, including non-doctrinal details, of Mass rubrics. We are a Church and not a museum.

The late Michael Davies, who apparently propagated somewhat different views, depending on the audience, as to the validity of the Novus Ordo Mass, was wrong and quite mischievous to ever suggest its invalidity. Low rent rubrics or not, it IS a Mass and all of the things that occur at Mass occur at Novus Ordo Masses. Bread and wine are transubstantiated (not consubstantiated as Lutherans believe) into the literal Body and Blood of Jesus Christ under the continued appearances of bread and wine. The one time sacrifice of Jesus Christ is made immanent (present) upon the Catholic altar (and the non-Tridentine Eastern Orthodox altar for that matter). As Davies observed, the Novus Ordo bears all too much resemblance to Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and that Cranmer himself was a secretly married priest whose wife was the daughter of a major Lutheran theologian and whose Lutheran heresies Cranmer likely accepted (for which apostasy he was executed during the reign of good Catholic Queen Mary Tudor). That is good enough reason to abolish Novus Ordo. It is NOT good enough reason to deny the validity of Novus Ordo OR to justify the existence of the schismatic pestilence known as SSPX.

Finally, Novus Ordo has laid down some roots at this point. It ill behooves the Church as a prudential matter to treat Novus Ordo Catholics as Tridentine Catholics were treated forty or so years ago. Novus Ordo Catholics did not invent and impose the Novus Ordo. That was done by the hierarchy with little or no apparent concern for the laity, for the sense of the sacred, or for the fact that the new rite would be a source of division in the pews. As the Church returns (as I certainly believe it will) to the Tridentine Mass, first as a more available option, then as the restored liturgical norm of the Church, those who favor the Tridentine should be far more gentle in our approach to those who do not favor it than were the early Novus Ordo types who acted like liturgical versions of Attila the Hun on the march. Making absolutist arguments by referencing Quo Primum as the one and final authority on liturgy convinces no one and avails is little but continued civil war in the pews.

Nice is better than not nice if you want our old Mass back and not ghettoized.