Posted on 08/19/2007 6:41:43 AM PDT by maryz
LOL! That's it!
I think the NO mass puts the focus much more on the priest himself than the TLM did. Obviously, there have always been some priests who celebrate more reverently than others, or whose Latin is better, etc., and therefore are preferred by the faithful. But now our focus is Father's personality and how he shapes the mass to fit that personality, how it becomes his vehicle for self-expression; and to not like this approach is to reject him in a very personal way, as far as he's concerned.
Oh, it’s definitely possible to celebrate the NO better than it is usually celebrated - using the Roman canon, not ad-libbing, taking care with the gestures, etc.
But much of the ritual aspect is missing from the NO and just as some priests try to add their own personality to the mass, others try to add a level of ritual to the NO.
There are virtually no actual rubrics in the NO for things which, in the old mass, were carefully dictated (gestures, in particular). We have one priest who celebrates very carefully - using the hand positions and gestures from the TLM. But there is very little in the NO that is prescribed or proscribed in writing.
Furthermore, the rearrangement of the parts has led to a change in emphasis. The addition of a third reading does make it very easy to regard the “liturgy of the word” part as more important than anything else. Furthermore, the conscious and intentional removal of the sets of three from gestures, words, etc. left the ritual “unbalanced” and certainly very different in pace and rhythm from the TLM. (My suspicion is that this was done by the zealot modernists of VatII to horizontalize and desacralize the Mass, because 3 is traditionally a sacred number and Three is particularly significant to Christians.)
So while it can certainly be celebrated better, I think it has some fundamental flaws. I suspect that one of the hopes of BXVI was that the two forms would interact in such a way that there would eventually be momentum to revise the NO and deal with some of these problems.
...I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but for a lot of parishioners, that would be a long time to kneel, and a lot of very sore knees...
Daneels turns 75 next June 4th. :-)
Thanks for the ping! Odd article - Danneels is a Paul VI appointee who is probably one of those most responsible for the collapse of the Church in Europe, and all of a sudden he’s surfacing with this article, which seems to indicate an entirely different understanding.
He begins with an extremely defensive posture on the NO (and I think we’re going to see a lot of clergy and “scholars” defending the NO tooth and nail just because they were involved in developing or enforcing it), and then moves to identifyng just about every one of its shortcomings. Of course, he seems to feel that these would be corrected by just celebrating it “better,” although oddly enough, he also mentions some problems that are structural and can only be improved by revising the form radically - or going back to the Tridentine Rite.
Quite mystifying, given his track record.
Or, as one comment on Fr. Z's blog reads:
Never before, to my knowledge, has he made a statement sympathetic to a traditional understanding of liturgy like the one above. My guess is he’s feeling the Benedictine wind biting at his nose.My other guess? It’s six years before he turns 80. . .
We shall have to watch his future progress with interest! ;-)
See my post #28!
Yes -- it sounds like he's trying, but he can't quite spit it out!
I hadn’t considered that! I didn’t realize he was so “young,” frankly. The Paul VI boy bishops really wreaked havoc on the Church.
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