THIS POST IS A CONTINUATION OF THE ONE BELOW IT AND THE BOMBSHELL THAT THE NEW OFFICE MANAGER OF THE CONGREGATION FOR DIVINE WORHSIP OFFERS US

The Reform of the Reformed Extraordinary Form Mass must say NO, No, NO, ABSOLUTELY NO to the following:

There are three most important things that Abbot Dom Michael John Zielinski, OSB Oliv. offers us in a talk he gave in 2009 which you can read HERE. Let me state these in a nutshell.

These three things are summoned up suscintly in the following:

"Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, expressed on a number of occasions his profound concern for the crisis in the cultus of the Church that we have experienced in the decades following the Second Vatican Council, from the (#1) “fabrication” of new rites, (#2)to the banalization of ecclesiastical music and (#3)the unprecedented re-ordering of the spatial arrangements of churches (see The Ratzinger Report [Ignatius, 1985], The Feast of Faith [Ignatius, 1986], The Spirit of the Liturgy [Ignatius, 2000])."


#1. (Fabrication of new rites) "In a simple yet undoubtedly crucial restoration – that of distributing Holy Communion to communicants kneeling at papal Masses – Pope Benedict has said once and for that all traditional ritual gestures and postures retain their value." (My comment: This obviously means also celebrating the Vatican II Ordinary Form Mass facing Ad Orientem or at least having the "Benedictine Altar Arrangement" where the priest and the congregation together face the crucifix as the loci for focusing prayer in public worship.

#2. (banalization of ecclesiastical music) Which means the constant new things that are thrown at us in disposable hymnals and manufactured hymns of questionable quality becoming the focus of the rites rather than the words of the rites themselves, especially the Introit, Offertory and Communion antiphons. But tied into this is the setting of sacred words of the Mass and other rites to secular, happy clappy sounds more suited to the top 50 or Broadway!

#3. (Church architecture and the unprecedented reordering of such) We all know of the iconoclasm that occurred in traditional Gothic and Romanesque Churches and the various takes on this style after Vatican II where traditional high altars and accompanying artwork and accoutrements for Mass were ripped out and junked or sold in to trade slavery. This has been the most visual scandal, with table like altars placed in the middle of the nave with seating angled around it, the tabernacle hidden and the table so low that only the first two rows in a large church can even see it. Then this iconoclasm has been imposed upon newer churches that are built that have no artistic merit whatsoever and resemble fast food joints more so than Catholic Churches.