Straight Popery

17th April 2013

Post reblogged from Future Battler of Pink Robots with 33 notes

digitalpapist:

discipleofkreia:

actuallycharlesbingley:

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.

Tagged: catholiccatholicismmassLatin MassTraditional Latin MassEucharistChristianjesusgodbible

Source: actuallycharlesbingley