Posted on 04/03/2004 9:38:01 AM PST by ultima ratio
Worse Than Deja Vu All Over Again:
Vatican caves on meaningful reform of disastrous New Mass
Thomas A. Droleskey, Ph.D.
“Certainly, we will preserve the basic elements, the bread, the wine, but all else will be changed according to local traditions: words, gestures, colors, vestments, chants, architecture, decor. The problem of liturgical reform is immense.”
--Pope John Paul, while still Bishop of Krakow, as quoted in Mon Ami: Karol Wojtyla. P. 220
When last we left the saga of the Novus Ordo Missae, Pope John Paul II promised Catholics worldwide that a new set of instructions to correct liturgical abuses would be drawn up and issued by the Holy See as a follow up to his Ecclesia de Eucharistica encyclical letter. This caused many well-meaning Catholics in the Novus Ordo community to jump up and down for joy, believing that the long awaited crackdown from Rome was forthcoming. Some commentators said at the time that the Pope’s encyclical letter was just the word “we needed” to have during the Easter season. Others of us said that the Holy Father’s encyclical letter made many of the same points as his 1980 Holy Thursday letter to priests, Dominicae Cenae, which promised a set of instructions to correct liturgical abuses.
Well, if a news report from Catholic World News’s website is to be believed, the forthcoming document from Rome about the liturgy is worse than deja vu all over again. The 1980 instruction, Inaestimabile Donum, issued by the then named Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship, did list the major abuses in the new Mass and called for them to be corrected. This gave much hope to those of us who did not then have the grace of tradition. Indeed, I waved copies of Inaestimabile Donum in the faces of offending priests for a year or two before I realized that Rome wasn’t going to enforce anything, including the reaffirmation of the ban on girl altar boys. Many of us did not realize at the time that the abuses were simply manifestations of the false presuppositions of a synthetic liturgy that sought to empty the Mass of its authentic tradition while claiming positivistically that tradition had been maintained as it was “updated.” There was no correcting the Novus Ordo then. There is no correcting it now. There will never be any correction of abuses in the Novus Ordo.
According to the CWN.com news story, the new document from Rome dealing with the liturgy will not mandate any disciplinary measures against liturgical abuses. It will merely call for an adherence to existing norms by “proper training” in the liturgy. If true, this is actually worse than Inaestimabile Donum. All of the thunder made by Francis Cardinal Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, in the immediate aftermath of the Pope’s encyclical last year was merely rhetoric, which yielded in the final instance to the desires of the ideological descendants of the late Archbishop Annibale Bugnini to keep exploding the liturgical time bombs that Michael Davies has noted with great precision were placed into the Novus Ordo as it was being created synthetically by the Consilium. Although this was entirely predictable, the fact that the new document will not represent the salvation of the Novus Ordo, which admits of so many legitimate adaptations and exceptions as to make any discussion of a liturgical “rite” an absolute oxymoron, should give traditionally minded priests who remain in the diocesan structure a wake up call. Rin Tin Tin and the Cavalry are not coming from Fort Apache.
All discussion of a “universal indult” for priests to offer the Traditional Latin Mass evidently has disappeared from the final text of the soon to be released liturgical document. Of course, Quo Primum is the only universal and perpetually binding indult any priest has ever needed to offer the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. The powers that be in Rome, however, do not want to admit that on behalf of the Holy Father, who must give his approval to the new document. Thus, those traditionally minded priests who thought that they were going to get a golden parachute from the Holy See so as to be able to offer the Traditional Latin Mass in the daylight rather than in the underground have been deceived. As good sons of the Church, many of these priests wanted to wait and see, although the outcome was predictable. Now that the outcome is clear, it is time for these priests to respond to this wake up call. They will receive no help from this pope.
Indeed, Pope John Paul II is wedded to the liturgical revolution, and has been since the Second Vatican Council. He is not going to be leading the cavalry over the hill. The late Father Vincent Miceli gave me a very important insight into the mind of the Holy Father back in January of 1983. As a self-deceived Catholic conservative who held out high hopes for the pontificate of the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla when he was elevated to the Throne of Saint Peter on October 16, 1978, I was flabbergasted that the Pope had appointed the then Archbishop of Cincinnati, Joseph Bernardin, to succeed the late John Cardinal Cody as Archbishop of Chicago. Bernardin? Chicago? That was the stuff of Father Andrew Greeley. I had written a priest-friend in Canada in 1979 at around the time Greeley began to push Bernardin for Chicago, that “this will never happen in the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. Father Miceli took a few bites out of his meal at a diner in Massapequa Park, Long Island, New York, looked at me and said, “The Pope’s a liberal. Bernardin is a friend of his from the Second Vatican Council. They are fellow progressives. Don’t kid yourself.” He continued eating his meal in perfect peace. Well, although I filed Father Miceli’s wise counsel away, I didn’t want to believe it at the time. He was, of course, quite right.
To wit, I received a letter from a reader of Christ or Chaos (which is going to become an online publication by the end of February) that contained a nugget from a 1980 book, Mon Ami: Karol Wojtyla, written by a fellow named Malinski and published in France:
"In 1965—when Pope John Paul II was still the Bishop of Krakow, he discussed the phenomenon referred to as inculturation with a friend, saying: 'Certainly, we will preserve the basic elements, the bread, the wine, but all else will be changed according to local traditions: words, gestures, colors, vestments, chants, architecture, decor. The problem of liturgical reform is immense.'" (page 220)
The reader, Mr. A. E. Newman, had a pithy comment or two of his own in his letter to me: “Tell me, what hope is there from a man who thinks like this–what hope for a stable liturgy, for upholding of age long traditions? What hope from a man who flies in the face of his predecessors? Now that his reign is drawing to a close I can answer that [there is] no hope! My own view is that in the eyes of history the last three popes will bear a heavy responsibility for our present shambles and [the loss] among the faithful of millions. Just at the moment when Islam is strong. We can credit him for one thing: he followed through! God will deal with him, but we [will deal] with the deformation of our Faith.”
Although the fodder for an entire series of articles, the comments of the then Archbishop of Krakow are quite instructive. They should serve as a sobering reminder to good priests and laity who believed that the Novus Ordo can be reformed that the problem rests in the new Mass itself. Not much time needs to be wasted on this as the proverbial handwriting is really on the wall. Those traditionally minded priests who have remained in the Novus Ordo structure should stop believing that their words or even their presence can counteract entirely the harm to the Faith contained within the new Mass, admitting that there are priests within the diocesan structure who are zealous for the salvation of souls and who spend themselves tirelessly for the flock entrusted to their pastoral care. They should, as painful as it may be for them to consider, simply follow the courageous examples of Father Stephen P. Zigrang and Father Lawrence Smith. They should assert their rights under Quo Primum no matter what unjust ecclesiastical consequences might befall them. Many of their sheep will follow them, and those sheep will provide for their temporal needs, as is happening at Our Lady Help of Christians Chapel in Garden Grove, California, where hundreds upon hundreds of fed-up Catholics have found their way to the Catholic underground simply by word of mouth. It is simply time to force the Novus Ordo structure, built on quicksand, to collapse of its own intellectual dishonesty and liturgical incompleteness. It is time for good priests to say goodbye to a synthetic concoction and to bravely embrace the glory of Tradition.
Each priest must make his own decision in this regard. It is, though, a grave disservice to the faithful to try to pretend that the Novus Ordo itself is not the problem and/or that the problems will get better over the course of time. They will not. The Novus Ordo remains the prisoner of its own false presuppositions and of the devolution of liturgical decision making to local level, as was envisioned in Paragraph 22 of Sacrosanctum Concilium itself on December 1, 1963.
What applies to priests applies as well to the long-suffering laity who have waited for such a long time to see the abuses that have their origin in the Novus Ordo itself come to an end. So many good people, who dearly love God and want to save their souls, have fought valiant but ever failing efforts in most instances to keep the liturgical time bombs from exploding in their own local parishes and dioceses. Some of these people have tried to equip themselves with the latest “information” from Rome about what is licit and illicit in the context of Holy Mass. What these good people need to realize, though, is that the Novus Ordo is impermanent and unstable of its very nature. The new Mass is entirely predicated upon the idiosyncratic predilections of a bishop or a priest or diocesan and/or parish liturgical committees.
The Mass of Tradition has always been beyond even the realm of a bishop to change for reasons of “inculturation” or the “genius of the peoples.” The Immemorial Mass of Tradition gives God the fitting and solemn worship that is His due, communicates clearly and unequivocally the nature of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice for human sins, and provides a permanence and stability that are reflective of the nature of God Himself and of man’s need for Him and His unchanging truths. It is time for good lay people themselves to say goodbye to the angst and confusion and anger generated by all of the problems associated with the Novus Ordo Missae.
Enough said.
Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us.
You're the safe one. Two things you are safe to criticize on FR are Kerry and the Catholic Church.
It was a reference to an earlier post. Sorry for any confusion. Maybe I shouldn't assume that everyone reads all the posts as if we were in a group having a discussion and it was permissible to respond to one post, but actually addressing a different poster.
I meant no ill will whatsoever and was being facetious to you in order to make a point with someone else. Mea culpa.
See Fr. Anthony Cekada's article Russia and the Leonine Prayers:
In 1934 a German writer, Father Bers, investigated the origins of the story of Leo’s vision. “Wherever one looks,” he observed, “one may find this claim — but nowhere a trace of proof.”...
- Writings which promote the story give no references to sources.
- The various accounts contradict each other as to where the vision supposedly took place — after Mass at the foot of the altar, or in a conference with cardinals.
- The various accounts are inconsistent about the date of the vision.
- The dates the accounts give for the alleged vision (1880, 1884 and 1888) do not correspond with the date when the St. Michael prayer was actually instituted (1886).
- There appears to be no corroboration for the story in a contemporary account which one would expect to have mentioned the event, had it indeed taken place.
These considerations all tend to support the conclusion Father Bers arrived at in the 1930s: “that the ‘vision’ had been invented in later times for some reason,” and that the story was simply feeding upon itself.
...
To sum up, then: The lengthy 1888 prayer to St. Michael was composed after the St. Michael prayer in the Leonine Prayers appeared. The passages in the 1888 text which are supposedly “prophetic” refer in fact to the Italian government’s seizure of Church property. Once the King of Italy appeared willing to arrive at a settlement of the Roman Question, the Vatican dropped from the prayer passages which he and the Italian government would have found offensive.
LOL. I thought you had already exhibited an otherworldy patience. Thanks for a good post.
News to me. The Roman Rite was codified in roughly 600 AD by Gregory the Great and most of its elements were in place in Rome by 300AD.
And it was in LATIN in Rome.
Williamson, Pope of SSPX is the source.
They have the same FRiends too. Instantly. Imagine that.
Very likely. The past century has seen the altogether denial of incriminating prophecy from LaSalette, Fatima and now this denial of Pope Leo XIII's vision. Who stands to benefit from suppression of those messages?
Leo XIII's prayer could very likely refer to the Chair of Peter. Why wouldn't the devil want it? That is why we must be vigilant and critical of all those who deviate from the Faith, even the Pope himself. Our Lady of LaSalette predicted "Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the AntiChrist". Whether that means a geographic loss (valid Pope fleeing into exile) or an internal coup we don't know. However, the Pope himself is not the Catholic Faith. He is merely the guardian. We can and have survived without Popes for periods of time in Church history.
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