Posted on 04/25/2005 7:11:26 AM PDT by murphE
SMOKE gets in your eyes; and if it happens to be white smoke, announcing the advent of Pope Benedict XVI, and you belong to the "liberal" coterie of fantasists that equates the Catholic Church with Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, it may be a serious irritant.
Is the Pope a Catholic? There is a strong suspicion among the global media, sometimes amounting to hysteria, that the startling answer may be Yes. Is the madness finally over? Have 40 years of Mao-style continuing revolution within the Church run out of steam? Perhaps. Only time will tell; but the election of Pope Benedict raises a variety of hopes, prospects and possibilities that demand examination.
Firstly, it is necessary to dispose of the sexual distractions that obscure the more important issues because the secular media is interested in fornication, not transubstantiation. It is a depressing measure of the cloacal character of our age that the election of a successor of Peter is greeted with a raucous clamour over condoms. The so-called "liberals" are behaving at the moment as if the Church was in the grip of a fierce reaction. That is not happening. The reality is that, after four decades of demolishing the liturgy, devotional practice and Church authority, the wreckers have hit bedrock, reaching the essential core doctrines of the faith, which the indefectible nature of the Church makes it impossible to revise or abandon.
The catalyst of revolution was the Second Vatican Council. It was only a pastoral council, never comparable in authority with Trent or Vatican I. Only two of its documents had any dogmatic pretensions; but that is academic, since the documents were deliberately worded so vaguely as to admit of radical interpretation later. Among the foremost "progressive" advisers (to Cardinal Frings) at the Council was Father Josef Ratzinger, himself greatly influenced by Karl Rahner, the most powerful of the periti (experts) guiding the Council fathers.
All the evidence suggests that, like Blessed Pius IX, the present Pope has resiled from his early liberal tenets. The reasons are not far to seek. "By their fruits you shall know them" was Christ’s advice in Matthew 7, 16. What were the fruits of Vatican II, hyped as a great spiritual "renewal" of the Church? In France, "Eldest Daughter of the Church", attendance at Mass is now down to 8% (2% among young people). In the United States, in 1965, the year Vatican II ended, there were 49,000 men in training for the priesthood; by 2002 it had slumped to 4,700. Today there are around 3,000 parishes in the US without priests. Renewal?
In Britain, 90% of pupils attending Catholic secondary schools lapse from the faith before leaving. The number of baptisms in England and Wales in 1964 was over 137,000; today it is less than half that number. Nearer home, Glasgow archdiocese had 334,000 Catholics and 361 priests on the eve of Vatican II; by 1996 those numbers had fallen to 250,000 and 209 - and that was a decade ago. A survey last year found that, worldwide, 50% of Catholic priests no longer believed in transubstantiation. Renewal?
It falls to Benedict XVI to remedy this situation. He is exceptionally qualified to do so, because he has shown evidence of understanding the roots of the crisis better than his colleagues. Although a number of cardinals in the recent conclave were described as "conservative", Cardinal Ratzinger was probably unique in attaching key importance to reform of the liturgy, as a means of restoring the Church. In 1997 he said: "I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy..."
That was perceptive and accurate. There is an old Church maxim that runs "lex orandi, lex credendi," meaning simply that the rules by which people pray inform the way in which they believe. The Protestant Reformers acknowledged that and acted accordingly. So did the leaders of the Second Reformation (for that is what the post-Vatican II offensive against Catholic practice and belief amounted to). That is why such extreme measures of repression were employed against the Old Rite of Mass, known as the Tridentine, but dating from the fourth century.
The Old Mass, which has fought its way back into liturgical currency on an extraordinary scale, largely at the behest of young people, would be the ideal instrument of Pope Benedict’s re-evangelisation of the Church and the world. In tandem with a reform of the modern Mass, already tentatively under way, the foundations could be laid for a return to dignified worship and reassertion of doctrine. John Paul II had little interest in liturgical matters: the new Pope is deeply engaged. Therein lies a great hope for the Church. The notion that the Mass - in Catholic belief the bloodless continuation of the sacrifice of Calvary - should be disguised as a Protestant service, in pursuit of false ecumenism, is not tenable.
How will Benedict XVI carry out his mission? His choice of name is significant. By rejecting John, Paul or a combination thereof, he has departed from the blinkered, post-Conciliar psyche that suggests the Church was founded in 1962, rather than two millennia ago. Taken in conjunction with his recent homily, addressing the need to embark on evangelisation of the developed world, it signals a commitment to Europe, whose patron is St Benedict, rather than abandoning it in favour of the Third World.
The European Union’s rejection of Commissioner Buttiglione, for being faithful to the Catholic teaching on homosexuality, and its refusal to include even the most token reference to the continent’s Christian heritage in its proposed constitution, were straws in the wind. The 21st century will be an era of persecution, of one kind or another, for the Catholic Church. Objectively, that is good news: history has shown nothing reinvigorates Catholicism more than persecution, from Diocletian to the filth that was the Spanish Republic.
The Reformation began in Europe in 1519; the Counter-Reformation did not get under way until the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563. The Second Reformation began in 1962: we may soon see the first stirrings of a Second Counter-Reformation. Evviva il Papa.
"I've read accounts on both sides of the situation and what I really don't understand is the reason why Lefebvre felt it was an absolute necessity to consecrate the bishops against the explicit wishes of Rome."
From what I've read of his correspondence, I think he just didn't trust the Pope to come up with the goods. He had been told that a successor would be appointed for him, but nobody would give him any kind of guarantee or even discuss a date.
He knew that there were powerful episcopal conferences in Europe that did not want the situation resolving, and he didn't believe that the Pope would have the strength of will to go against them. In his opinion (rightly or wrongly) he felt that the only course of action which would preserve the Tradional rite, and the formation of traditional priests to celebrate it, was to go ahead and consecrate those bishops.
It doesn't really matter whether he was right or wrong in those beliefs because of the following in the CIC:
"Can. 1323 No one is liable to a penalty who, when violating a law or precept:
1° has not completed the sixteenth year of age;
2° was, without fault, ignorant of violating the law or precept; inadvertence and error are equivalent to ignorance
3° acted under physical force, or under the impetus of a chance occurrence which the person could not foresee or if foreseen could not avoid;
4° acted under the compulsion of grave fear, even if only relative, or by reason of necessity or grave inconvenience, unless, however, the act is intrinsically evil or tends to be harmful to souls;
5° acted, within the limits of due moderation, in lawful self defence or defence of another against an unjust aggressor;
6° lacked the use of reason, without prejudice to the provisions of cann. 1324, §1, n. 2 and 1325;
7° thought, through no personal fault, that some one of the circumstances existed which are mentioned in nn. 4 or 5."
Whether you agree with his analysis or not, he clearly believed that the Church was doomed to apostasy if the TLM was lost, the Pope didn't understand the gravity of the situation, and that a state of necessity existed.
Therefore, under clause 7 of the above canon he was not liable to a penalty of latae sententiae excommunication. If they had wanted to excommunicate him legally, he should have been afforded due process, brought to trial and given a chance to defend himself.
The issue here is not whether a state of necessity did in fact exist. The issue is whether he believed that a state of necessity existed. The only way he could have incurred a latae sententiae excommunication is if he did not believe that a state of necessity existed.
No Pope, Cardinal, Judge of the Rota or Canon Lawyer has the ability or power to get inside the mind of a man and find out what he really believed at a given point of time. Only that individual and Almighty God know for sure what he believed.
If he believed there was a necessity then he was not excommunicate.
What is forgotten by many is that Biblical/liturgical Greek (which are not two separate languages, but rather a continuum of slow development -- unlike ancient Greek, which really is a separate matter) is a living liturgical language, just as Latin once was for the Roman church -- particularly for the Roman church in countries with closely related languages, such as Italy. Academic treatments of Greek divorced from its living presence in the Greek Orthodox church are doomed to have many shortcomings.
I would also point out that if the "unity" of which you speak, when saying that there should be more Greek in the Roman mass, is unity between Orthodox and Catholics, the gesture would largely be lost on us.
The reason for this is that the Orthodox churches have always had an emphasis on the use of liturgical languages that are closely related enough to the vernacular to be easily understood with a little effort. Thus, we have Church Slavonic in the Slavic countries, the development of liturgical Arabic in the Middle East, and various vernacular liturgies in all the countries where Orthodoxy finds itself.
The transition to vernacular liturgies is driven by two factors: the language of prayer of those present, and the availability of good translations. Given the fact that it takes more than 20 volumes to contain the full corpus of a year's worth of liturgical services in the Orthodox church, the latter is no small issue -- many things continued to be done in Greek and Slavonic in this country for quite a while because translations simply hadn't been done of that particular book.
While there are "chauvinistic" parishes that keep their old languages even when no-one there can really understand the services, this is becoming less and less the case. Good priests will tailor the percentage of English and the "old language" based on the number of people there for whom one language or the other is the language of prayer with which they are most comfortable.
In my parish, for instance, there are a couple of people whose primary language of prayer is Greek -- we do a little Greek for their sake. There is only one person whose primary language is a Slavic tongue -- and she wasn't a church-goer in the Ukraine, so she actually understands liturgical English better than Church Slavonic. So even though we are a "Russian tradition" parish, we don't do any Slavonic. There is no reason to.
The only example of an ancient language being left in place for historical reasons are the greetings of the bishop in Slavic churches. This harks back to the early days of the Slavic churches where the bishops continued to be Greek during the centuries while Slavic monasticism was growing and maturing (our bishops traditionally are drawn from the ranks of the monastics.) We have carried this practice into English: when our bishop visited a few months ago, he was honored by singing (in Greek) "Eis polla eti despota!" Most parishes really enjoy singing this and belt it out... This is with the Russians, that is. Some of the Balkan countries who were less fond of their last Greek bishops have translated these greetings out of Greek into their own languages.
There is simply no replacement for liturgies that can be understood thoroughly, since so much teaching of the faith takes place during the services.
The problem with the NO is not that it isn't in Latin -- it is that it represented a radical discontinuity in content and spirit from the traditional Western liturgies, both in content and in spirit. What happened to the Roman liturgy would be like having our bishops appear one day and tell us that in 6 months, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom would be banned, and that a new composition/compilation would be put in its place. Our bishops would be driven out of town by the people so fast their heads would spin.
An Orthodox observer of the Roman liturgical situation finds mystifying the idea that the return to Latin and a return to liturgical sanity are inextricably linked. From what I've read of the new Pope's writings, I certainly don't think that he sees them as being at all linked. But he does see that there was a liturgical collapse, and that this collapse underlies and is linked to the general collapse of faith, piety, and morals in the Catholic church.
And thank God that you've finally got a Pope who actually seems to understand this, and care about the liturgical life of the Roman church...
Maybe if Catholics hear someone other than traditional Catholics explain that the "content and spirit" of the Latin liturgy has been lost, maybe they'll listen.
Several years ago, I showed an Eastern Catholic man how you can take the Novus Ordo mass prayers and compare them to the Traditional Latin Mass prayers, side by side. He was not aware there were differences. I told him, anyone can do this. Just get one copy on one side and the other copy on the other side and compare them line by line. We tried it, and he was blown away. He said the differences in teaching is so obvious. How could anyone say that "they are the same thing?"
And yet, I have heard numerous Catholics make this claim. I ask them if they have compared them side by side, and they never say they have. I ask how they can say they are the same if they have not compared them, and all they can tell me is because their priest told them the two are the same.
It seems to me a lot of priests have been lying to their flock.
1. Since Latin was not a living liturgical language for the vast majority of the faithful, most didn't know the finer points of what was being prayed in the liturgies. I'm not talking about "Credo in unum Deum..." and "Pater Noster..." and common stuff like that -- I'm talking about the priest's secret prayers, etc... Educated native Italian speakers probably would be the best off in this regard, but let's just say that if Catholics had known the Latin liturgies *and what they mean* by heart the way that native Greek speakers know the Liturgy of John Chrysostom, there would have been no need to put the books side by side. In other words, the Latin mass was at least to some extent one of its own enemies.
2. There was no period of genuine transition. The way that transition happened (and is still happening in many parishes) in Orthodox liturgies was that the priest will do a litany here or there in English, then have the congregation say the Creed in Greek, then in English. When this goes on for decades, as it did with us, there are quite a few people in the congregation who are going to know both the old and the new languages well enough to spot when something hasn't been translated right, and raise a fuss. What happened with the NO was that all at once the Latin was replaced with a vernacular liturgy. Why wouldn't there be the assumption that they were the same texts? But there was no side-by-side comparison during a time of transition being done in the pews by "native" Latin speakers who knew English fluently.
3. The idea of the Papal Magesterium and a general clericalism has created the idea in the popular Catholic consciousness that whatever has the imprimatur must be OK. The former Cardinal Ratzinger himself has written on this, with statements that could have been taken from the mouth of an Orthodox hierarch with little adaptation.
As to whether skeptical modern Catholics content with the NO would listen to an old Orthodox curmudgeon like me, I don't know. In the case of many, I would imagine that they would not believe "even if a man were to return from the dead...", as the Scripture says.
DB, I'll second everything that Agrarian has posted, though as he'll tell you, I am, at base, a real Greek chauvinist! At our parish, 80+% of the Liturgy and even more of the other services is prayed or chanted in English. The Choir does a bit more in Greek. The truth of the matter is that if the Church and the Liturgy here were all about me and the few Greeks who actually speak Greek left, I'd want the entire Liturgy in Greek, but it isn't about us. In the past 10 years or so, since we went increasingly English in the Liturgy, I have seen an explosion in growth in the parish and a spiritual renewal the like of which I have never seen in my life. Lex orandi, lex credendi means just as much, no, more in English than it does in Greek! :)
Please understand, by the way, that I love Latin. My undergraduate degree was in Classics. Greek and Latin, for me, are still the Mother tongues. The Latin Mass expressed the Faith of the Holy Roman Church is so sublime a manner. The NO "Mass" is just a protestantized abomination. And yes, when your priests told you that the NO was a harkening back to original forms of the Liturgy, they were lying to you, possibly not intentionally, but lying nevertheless.
I do hope you don't get too hung up on the Latin. The Liturgies of the Church are among other things didactic tools. Teaching the Truths of the Faith in the vernacular fulfills that particular purpose.
Allow me to add my second to these words coming from a self-identified Greek chauvinist! My Latin (like my Greek) is self-taught, and thus inadequate. I've made all my kids take at least 3 years of Latin in high school (it's not offered at the local Catholic high school, BTW... just at the public schools), and when we were at a Greek parish, I made them go to Greek school. They became grateful...
But we pray in English.
Just got back from the Matins and surprise surprise, we had a psaltis from Greece there and we did about half of it in Greek. It was absolutely spectacular. Even the converts loved it!
And please try to remember: you are not one of the key players. Like I said, what they have to say would shock you. But you might not live long enough to hear them say it.
And yet, I have heard numerous Catholics make this claim. I ask them if they have compared them side by side, and they never say they have.
Here is an article that does just that:
Latin has been a preserving influence on the Roman Church. What I think about Latin is not really important, but what it has done for the Church at large is very important. They say that the master stroke of the revolutionaries was to SAY they were going to maintain Latin, but then what they DID was to moth ball it.
I know a priest who was ordained in 1966 as a Jesuit. They still had the same rigorous Latin studies in place at that time. You will recall that was one year after VatII closed, and 3 years before the NO liturgy was proliferated (not promulgated). He explains that while they were in class learning the Latin Mass rubrics, etc., the instructors told the students that they had to learn this material but that "you won't have to use it." This proves that the abolition of Latin at Mass was a planned agenda, that while VatII contained words to the effect that Latin would be preserved, the word behind the scene was that it would be preserved in formaldahyde, as a curiosity, a relic of an age past and no more.
And there are people (you can see some on these threads) who refuse to think that the Faith was in jeopardy. Some people just don't want to know, I guess.
Saint Joan of Ark was dead prior to her elevation.
Further, you bring to mind all of the heretic bishops appointed in fact by the atheist communists in China who demand loyalty to the party, and no recognition of the Pope as the Vicar of Christ on Earth.
Your mention of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, brings to mind the double standard the Holy See applied to him for consecrating bishops without the approval of the pope, and the Vatican's willful failure to apply the same rules to those heretic bishops named by Chinese communist government to run the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA).
The SSPX priests and bishops declare fidelity to the pope unlike the commie priests of the CCPA. Further, it was the CCPA which refused to attend the funeral of JPII or the installation N.O. Mass of BXVI. Why? Because the communists want the Vatican to cease recognizing Taiwan, and the Holy See hasn't agreed to take that action.
The underground Roman Catholic Church faithful have also declared their fidelity to the Holy See. Yet, it is the Holy See that offers them no solace - demanding instead the underground faithful, bishops and priests 'negotiate' with the heretic CCPA. In the meantime the SSPX is also being denied full recognition by the Church. The underground faithful have no church buildings. They meet secretly and perform Holy Mass in the homes of the faithful.
'Underground' bishops appointed by the pope have been imprisoned, tortured and have and are suffering a martyr's death to this day.
As recently as January twenty-fourth of this year, Bishop John Gao Kexian, of Yantai, China, died in prison where he had been for the past five years......His body was cremated and buried the day following his death in the presence of police officers. No relative or faithful were allowed to attend the event. The Bishop died without any religious comforts and his body was not blessed.
The above is a brief description of just some of the hypocrisy of the Holy See in its' capricious application of Cannon Law. In one arm it is privately embracing heretics, and with the other it locks the faithful away from its protection and recognition.
This looks great! I'm making it a "favorite" immediately!
Thanks much!!
But I'll probably have to fight the nausea reading those NO acclamations again. It won't be fast, that's for sure.
I've promised my priest that I'll do the hymn of St. Cassiana in Byzantine chant (in English) tomorrow night at Bridegroom Matins. I told him that if I got brave I'd try it, and his eyes got really big and he said, "Well, screw up your courage, my man!"
I need to do some practicing tonight!
Its a tough one to do well as it needs a voice which is both powerful and capable of expressing the emotion of the words. Done well, in a church full of non Greek speakers, there won't be a dry eye in the house. I won't even try it! I'll just sit and cry.
I would think that Latin would play this same role in the Roman church, but it could really only be a true living language of prayer in countries where the native language was most similar -- Italy, Spain... and amongst the educated clergy.
It had a useful "universalizing effect," in that the mass was the same in any country in the world -- which had certain advantages which were lost.
Your stories are fascinating about the "foreknowledge" that the Jesuit professors had. Clearly it was all planned out well in advance -- or at least they knew that the right people were in place, making the outcome inevitable.
Great posts Salvation...thankyou!
"Well, he's certainly in a position now to do something to correct the disaster, isn't he? I hope you're not holding your breath."
Back in 1988, Ratzinger said the Old Mass would not return. By that I assume he meant its everyday use. My guess he will now concentrate on reforming Novus Ordo both in an attempt to rehabilitate Vatican II and to rescue the reputation of JPII. Politically, he has little to gain in heavily promoting the Old Mass instead of a revised Novus Ordo. Traditionalists are in danger of expecting too much from the new pope weighed down by the baggage of forty years.
"The reason I say that I don't believe JPII was very attached to the Tridentine is that the tone of Ecclesia Dei was somewhat that of a concession to the Faithful who sought it, but not at all a strong defense of the Mass itself."
Am pretty sure the last pope would not have cared if the Old Mass had disappeared completely. It was maintained frugally to please a few influencial people and groups ... and maybe to take the heat off the wider criticism of Vatican II. Ecclesia Dei must really be seen as a manipulative device and not a promotional one.
"I've read accounts on both sides of the situation and what I really don't understand is the reason why Lefebvre felt it was an absolute necessity to consecrate the bishops against the explicit wishes of Rome."
He was looking towards the future ordination of his seminary priests. Any bishop chosen by Rome would have fouled up the precedure especially when it came to having to pay due respect to Novus Ordo (as is now the case in Campos). It all comes down to being free of Newchurch control.
St. Athanasius!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.