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To: ALPAPilot
Pope Benedict also had some criticism of the TLM in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, but he was trying to get to the essentials of the matter.

Care to quote that criticism? Once you do, I'll give you some of Pope Benedict's criticisms of Bugnini's Mass.

57 posted on 02/16/2014 6:55:42 PM PST by ebb tide
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To: ebb tide; BlatherNaut; Brian Kopp DPM; Reagan80; piusv
Care to quote that criticism? Once you do, I'll give you some of Pope Benedict's criticisms of Bugnini's Mass.

In the preface of the Spirit of the Liturgy

I should like to suggest a comparison. Like all comparisons, it is I'm many ways inadequate, and yet it may aid understanding. We might say that in 1918, the year that Guardini published his book, the liturgy was rather like a fresco. It had been preserved from damage, but it had been almost completely overlaid with whitewash by later generations. In the Missal from which the priest celebrated, the form of the liturgy that had grown from its earliest beginnings was still present, but, as far as the faithful were concerned, it was largely concealed beneath instructions for and forms of private prayer. The fresco was laid bare by the Liturgical Movement and, in a definitive way, by the Second Vatican Council.

In defending Pope Francis, I was not trying to make an argument for or against either the TLM or the Novus Ordo. What I was trying to point out is that I believe the Pope believes he is faced with a much graver problem, summed up in a story Pope Benedict related about St. Therese of Lisieux in Introduction to Christianity:

"To her, "religion" really was a self-evident presupposition of her daily existence; she dealt with it as we deal with the concrete details of our lives. Yet this very saint, a person apparently cocooned in complete security, left behind her, from the last weeks of her passion, shattering admissions that her fortified sisters toned down in her literary remains and that have only now come to light in the new verbatim editions. She says, for example, "I am assailed by the worst temptations of atheism". Her mind is beset by every possible argument against the faith; the sense of believing seems to have vanished; she feels that she is now "in sinners' shoes. In other words, in what is apparently a flawlessly interlocking world someone here suddenly catches a glimpse of the abyss lurking - even for her - under the firm structure of the supporting conventions. In a situation like this, what is in question is not the sort of thing that one perhaps quarrel about otherwise - dogma of the Assumption, the proper use of confession - all this becomes absolutely secondary. What is at stake is the whole structure; it is a question of all or nothing. That is the only remaining alternative; nowhere does there seem anything to cling to in the is sudden fall. Wherever one looks, only the bottomless abyss of nothingness can be seen.

I think he believes Christianity faces and existential crisis and that focusing on the relative merits of the various liturgical forms is akin to fiddling while Rome burn. Neither do I have much sympathy for the offended classes.

P.S.

Personally, I am fan of both Latin and the TLM. I also get my personal daily readings from http://www.breviary.net, which is also Pre-Vatican II

65 posted on 02/17/2014 3:17:29 PM PST by ALPAPilot
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