Post reblogged from Future Battler of Pink Robots with 33 notes
Both the Ordinary Form of the Mass and the Extraordinary Form of the Mass are accepted in the Church. As long as it isn’t abused, the Ordinary Form is not heretical. I don’t believe either Mass is better or worse than the other. They are both MASS. THEY ARE BOTH THE HOLY SACRIFICE. I’m getting really sick of people talking about how TLM is the REAL Mass. They’re both the real Mass.
EWTN and the Papal masses are great examples of Novus Ordo. In case people haven’t realized, the Extraordinary Form can be abused too. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe those who want to return to the Pre-Vatican II days are covering up these abuses to make their cause look better?
The EF was abused before the introduction of the NO, largely for the same reasons then as today.
The reason why EF Masses today are, on the whole, solid and reverent is due to a self-selection; since no one is required to celebrate the EF, and one must choose to either learn or enter an institute with traditional liturgy as its charism, one gets a select group of celebrants who ardently desire to celebrate the liturgy reverently.
With the NO, it’s the ordinary form. Everyone has to celebrate it, so you get a much wider disparity with none of the internal selection.
Anyone who believes that prior to the introduction of the Mass of Paul VI Mass was celebrated perfectly with no abuse is deluding themselves. In various countries, local folk music had been substituted for sacred chant for centuries (with or without permission). Vernacular had been substituted in. Prayers had been changed/omitted.
Priests had gotten away with it because
A). Most people didn’t know enough Latin or have liturgical resources on hand to make a difference
B). Most people couldn’t really tell what the priest was doing anyway
One of the reasons you saw an impetus towards liturgical reform was to introduce a liturgy that would overcome the distance from the true theology of the Mass and the way most people viewed it. It’s why the idea of “active involvement” got a lot of currency. It would have hopefully forced a sense of conformity to the rubrics by drawing the laity in, and would have the laity understand and participate in the sacred dynamic of the Mass.
Except none of that happened. Instead of the laity assuming a more “dignified” role, it simply lead to the clericalization of the laity and the laicization of priests. “Active participation” meant every damn piece of music must be belted out*. Rubrics were simply discard because any notion of the vertical/transcendent of the Mass was thrown aside in the interest of vindicating and legitimizing a material community.
I really don’t know what other conclusion can be drawn except that the NO Mass, in the majority of its historical celebrations, has been a failure.
Sure, the way Pope Benedict celebrated it was beautifully reverent. I just doubt that more than 2% of all the NO’s celebrations come anywhere close to its reverence. Until you start seeing massive reform of allowable deviations from the rubrics, and a strong emphasis on sacred music, you won’t get out of the quagmire.
That’s not to say the NO Mass is bad, or heretical. In fact, its greatest strength is how more than half of the prayers/responses are directly from Scripture. The entire liturgy is a form of Scriptural exegesis. And I love that.
Signed,
Someone who has to deal with guitars, drums, and a surprisingly large number of Spanish compositions in a parish where 99% of the people are native English speakers.
*One of the lies most of us were fed in various religious ed programs was that the more we are “participating” (I.e. singing, verbally responding to the prayers, etc), the better we were doing. Again, that’s a lie.
I think the money quote above is “Until you start seeing massive reform of allowable deviations from the rubrics, and a strong emphasis on sacred music, you won’t get out of the quagmire.” However, any more reforms at this point would simply through the faithful into even more confusion. Now that the can of worms has been opened, so to speak, there is an even greater freedom for individual celebrants to impose their own liturgical vision onto the rites, and thus any more attempt at reform would simply be seen as pontiff x or prelate y imposing their own personal views on everyone else (i.e. the way the media tries to contrast Pope Benedict and Pope Francis). Priestly Institutes established for the celebration of good liturgy in any form and the formation of priests according to solid liturgical principles are a relatively new phenomenon in the life of the church, and until more priests have this solid background, any return to our patrimony will have to be a grassroots movement. And this is precisely one of the reasons more and more people are liking the old Mass: in an attempt to restore our liturgical patrimony the EF provides a sort of short-cut to this process, because this form allows for fewer deviations from the ‘ideal’ and more protection from abuses. digitalpapist actually makes similar remarks to what Cardinal Arinze made a few years ago: celebrate the OF according to these ideals and there’d be smaller demand for the EF.
Of course, for whatever it’s worth my opinion is that part of the vertical-ness of the EF precisely comes from its texts, and the simplification of those texts in the OF contribute to its horizontal-ness. Which is why I think the EF cannot simply be replaced by an OF Mass celebrated in a very similar manner.
Finally, the sacraments are the very means by which Christ enacts our salvation here on earth. Some people don’t like these debates, but I think if we need to argue over something this would be the most important thing to debate.
Source: actuallycharlesbingley
Link reblogged from HumilisMeDominus with 9 notes
HumilisMeDominus: Bishop Williamson on why a Catholic cannot attend FSSP/Latin Mass Society/etc →
Number CCLXIII
28 July 2012
CONCILIAR INFECTION
May Catholics who wish to keep the Faith attend a Tridentine Mass celebrated by a priest who is part of the Conciliar Church, for instance by his belonging to the Institute of Christ the King or to the Fraternity of St Peter ? The answer…
If I am to understand this correctly, +Williamson’s argument is that Masses celebrated by the visible Church are so inherently dangerous to the soul that one cannot even associate with it, lest one fall into sin. An example similar to it would be why we must avoid associating with the occult, even if such tools are marketed as innocent fun.
There are firstly certain assumptions that power the bishop’s argument that I cannot agree with, and they are:
1. That the SSPX can make pronouncements on what the faithful can and cannot do in good conscience. These are reserved for the ordinary magisterium; the pope and the bishops in union with him. While it is the SSPX’s position that they are in full communion with the pope, the pope himself has said and I quote:
Until the doctrinal questions are clarified, the Society has no canonical status in the Church, and its ministers - even though they have been freed of the ecclesiastical penalty - do not legitimately exercise any ministry in the Church
Unless the SSPX does not in fact recognize Pope Benedict XVI as the head of the Catholic Church, I would go with what the pope actually said rather than what they think a pope should say.
2. The common SSPX distinction between the “conciliar church” and the “eternal church”. While I am not (yet) well read in theology, I’m fairly certain the visible catholic church has not changed its beliefs at all, let alone changed them so drastically as to declare it a separate religion, a charge leveled by the SSPX. While it’s undeniable that the practice of the Church has changed, and perhaps not for the better, one would have to go down practice by practice to determine if there is a change, and if so whether it is promulgated by the universal church or simply by men within the church. The whole dichotomy is reminiscent of certain protestant denominations’ claim to succession by nature of the body of Christ being invisible.
3. That faith comes before grace. It is the grace of God that allows us to both hold belief and to act upon it. This grace comes primarily from the sacraments. While we may intellectually assent to the articles of the faith, the grace of God is what allows us to truly believe.
4. That the damage done and being done to the church is primarily caused by Vatican II. This is an oversimplification of history, failing to take into account other movements that happened both simultaneously with the council and in the council’s aftermath.
5. By extension of 4, and then 2, the visible church is not who it says it is. It calls to mind those ‘reformers’ who claimed the body of Christ was not to be found under the pope of Rome, but under their own congregations, who in fact held the true faith.
6. Because of 4 and five, the MacIntyrean thesis that the church’s beliefs underwent such self destruction that even though the Church is holding what appears to be its own doctrines, they in fact mean something completely different than when they were professed before supposed period. Not only does it assume that the period was so completely destructive, but it fails to take into account that there are members of the magisterium, the present pope included, that remember vividly what the church was like before and after the period.
So on to the argument itself.
The basic reason is that the Catholic Faith is more important than the Mass. For if through no fault of my own even for a long time I cannot attend Mass but I keep the Faith, then I can still save my soul, whereas if I lose the Faith but for whatever reason go on attending Mass, I cannot save my soul (“Without faith it is impossible to please God” - Heb. XI, 6). Thus I attend Mass in order to live my Faith, and, belief going with worship, I attend the true Mass in order to keep the true Faith. I do not keep the Faith in order to attend Mass.
It is not the faith alone that saves, but God’s grace that saves. The Mass and the faith, as +Williamson does point out, go hand in hand. But he then turns around and subordinates the Mass to his view of the faith. What +Williamson seems to be implying here is that the visible church’s orders are in fact invalid, or at the very least, what passes for Mass in the visible church is in fact not Mass, because according to +Williamson they do not have the faith the church has always had and are thus not doing what the church has always intended when ordaining its men. The position is near impossible to prove, unless one is operating under assumption 6 above.
It follows that if the celebration of a Tridentine Mass is surrounded by circumstances that threaten to undermine my faith, then depending on the gravity of the threat, I may not attend such a Mass….
…Then what is meant by Conciliar circumstances ? The answer must be, any circumstances which, over a shorter or longer period of time, are going to make me think that the Second Vatican Council was not an utter disaster for the Church. Such a circumstance might be a charming and believing priest who has no problem with celebrating either the new or the old Mass, and who preaches and acts as though the Council presents no serious problem. Conciliarism is so dangerous because it can so be made to seem Catholic that I can lose the Faith without - or almost without - realizing it.
Now of course, the whole thing rests on whether or not the visible church has formally abandoned its own doctrine. +Williamson and his supporters claim so, but then, who is he to make such a pronouncement? Was not the reason Christ established a visible church was so that the faith and the means to attain it may never be lost? Then to suggest that Vatican II is the end of the visible church as we know it, as +Williamson implies, is absurd. And putting aside momentarily the question on whether the council was overall good or bad for the church, it is certainly not so inherently dangerous that mere association with it will draw souls into sin.
Also, part of the reason these traditional institutes exist is so that both the clergy and the laity who are attached to them may in good conscience celebrate the fullness of the faith without pressure from Ordinaries to conform to the questionable practices promulgated after Vatican II. They will most likely never celebrate the new Mass, and because they respect the boundaries placed upon them by the pope, are free to criticize insidious trends in the church. And in a recent set of dubia published by the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, they have clarified that the faithful may accept that certain practices as legally legitimate without accepting them as pleasing to God. +Williamson would want to make these institutes guilty of error by association, when they exist so they can ‘associate’ without associating.
+Williamson’s argument only makes sense if the visible church as a whole is not a valid alternative to his own Masses. That it is not substantially proven that the visible church is a fraud, plus the fact that there are traditional groups in full communion with the visible church, not only is there is a valid alternative to SSPX Masses, there is in fact a better alternative than SSPX Masses.
Photoset reblogged from Introibo Ad Altare Dei with 55 notes
Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament (Holy Eucharist).
Source: southphilly-tlm
Post with 4 notes
Catholics of the DC Metro area, look here
If you’re free this Saturday, come to Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The FSSP will offer a traditional High Mass for the vigil of Pentecost. Mass is at 5:30 PM in the Crypt Church. Confessions will be heard at normal times according to the basilica’s schedule, which I think is from 3:30 to 6 PM. While not the Mass for the Sunday, I think it legally fulfills the Sunday obligation.
If you want to hang out for a little before or afterward, put a message in my inbox.
http://tlm-md.blogspot.com/2012/05/fssp-annual-pilgrimage-to-washington-dc.html
Photo with 8 notes
One of many Masses celebrated outside the 2nd largest planed parenthood in the country. Spiritual warfare-doing it right.
Link reblogged from A Catholic Rose with 2 notes
Attire and Etiquette At Holy Mass →
I don’t often take stuff from fisheaters, but this is rather good.
Photo with 6 notes
News is circulating that the head of the canonically irregular group the society of St. Pius X, Bp. Bernard Fellay, has with some slight modifications signed a doctrinal preamble issued by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith which, should the same group and the Holy Father himself approve, should allow for talks of re-unification to go forward. While now is not the time to celebrate, now we may have concrete hope that re-unification may happen very soon. Please pray for the Holy Father and for the sspx.
Post with 3 notes
Oh Lordy
I am serving a TLM tomorrow for the first time. Pray that I don’t screw up.
Photo with 48 notes
How to set up an altar for a Requiem Mass. Note the use of violet, as black is prohibited on an altar where the blessed sacrament is reserved. Also, the unbleached beeswax candles.
Source: rorate-caeli.blogspot.com
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