It's interesting the Fr. Levis' second answer is actually wrong even by Novus Ordo standards. The current line is that the only Liturgy cannot be celebrated "publicly" without a celebret. Any priest however can say the Old Mass privately without the permission of his bishop.
But unless one knows Latin, this root sense will be lost on readers and will be understood as "made up out of nothing" which is hopelessly incorrect. The NO was assembled by the committee from the traditional liturgy and retained most of the traditional liturgy but made significant changes in the Offertory, at the beginning and end of the Mass etc. [And before anyone jumps on me to say that it substituted "all" for "many" in the Consecration etc., please, I'm talking about the Latin text of the NO, comparing it to the Tridentine. All sorts of infinitely worse changes were made in the vernacular translations. They are not at issue here. Adherents of the Tridentine Rite who argue against the NO on the basis of the vernaculars are comparing apples with oranges and don't deserve the time of day. If one wishes to compare the NO and the Traditional Latin Rite, then one has to compare the two Latin texts first, decide what was wrong with the NO in its Latin text. Then if one wishes one can move on to the translations. Errors in the translations can be corrected by new translations and strike absolutly no telling blow against the NO Latin text. Its errors need to be assessed on their own. Adding three new Eucharistic Prayers was "fabrication" in both the root Latin sense and the colloquial sense of the word.
My guess is that the former pastor's reference was to the replacing of the Offertory prayers for the bread and wine with the paraphrased pieces from the Didache--he probably meant that this constituted a restoration of a more ancient liturgical form than the Tridentine Rite. It's nonsense, of course and the Didache inserts don't fit at all and they come at the expense of the sacrificial emphasis of the Tridentine Offertory prayers. But if Fr. Levis had taken the time to point that out instead of unloading animaus against the NO, he would have educated his readers and made clear what the deficiencies of the NO are without misleading his readers.
It was an imprudent way to express his animus and he should not have let his animus get in the way of genuinely serving an honest inquirer. For all those reasons, it was a foolish reply and should not have been left standing, since it obviously had become a "prooftext" banging around the Internet. If he had only answered accurately and dispassionately he would have struck a much more telling blow against the NO and in favor of the Tridentine Rite. Instead, he brought embarrassment to the very cause he wished to serve, namely, devotion to the Tridentine Rite.
This is a good example of the need for prudence and charity on these issues. One can be devoted to the Tridentine Rite and criticize the NO without doing so with meanspirited animus. The defenders of the Tridentine Rite sometimes are their own worst enemies--which is true of defenders of just about anything.
To give credit where credit is due, this was your scoop.
I could swear I've read that first sentence 100 times before right here on FR. Sounds more like SSPX proselytizing than anything else. With all the photo shopping on the Internet nowadays, hacking capabilities to boot, who knows? That's what it could be.
Then again, I could be wrong. Either way, I expect better from their Expert Forum.
I think Colin Donovan edited this. He is the "VP" of Theology for EWTN, and pretty much determines waht is orthodox and what is not.
Mark Wyatt