WHY LITURGICAL TRADITIONALISTS FEAR LITURGICAL PROGRESSIVES

I think we can sum it up in one word, banality. I use it as "drearily commonplace." While a caricature and hopefully not typical outside of Masses with nearly 4 million people anywhere in the world, the plastic cup ciboria pictured during Pope Francis' final Mass in Rio is exactly what I mean.

Progressives don't care about these sorts of things and think plastic cups for ciboria containing the glorious crucified and risen Body and Blood of our God and Savior Jesus Christ is fine. After all, Jesus was held in a manger when He was born. Progressives hold an extremely low Christology that seems to forget that Christ is no longer a baby in a manger and he is no longer on the Cross. He is in heaven clothed in majestic glory. There is no doubt about His divinity now that the resurrection and ascension have occurred and the end times are here. He, the Christ, is clothed in glory!

Is not the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass a foretaste of the eternal banquet? Does not the Eastern Church tell us that if the Second Coming of Christ occurred during the Divine Liturgy we would not know the difference? Is not the one Sacrifice re-presented in an "unbloody" way, precisely that, unbloody, resurrectional in that sense, a foretaste of all of salvation history from the Word of God that always was, eternal, compressed into a "black hole" that we call the Divine Liturgy, the Holy Mass?

What is causing discomfort amongst orthodox Catholics are signs from the liturgical 1960's and mentality creeping into the papacy and being exaggerated by the left. The plastic cup ciboria of Rio is a result of a dumbed down pre-resurrectional theology of Christ, low Christology. It was rampant in my seminary in the 1970's and a time when corruption of all kinds was rampant there too and in the Church at large, a period of Church history when the molestation of teenage boys by Catholic priests was unprecedented.

Let us hope that the plastic cup ciboria is being viewed in Rome as a horrible abuse at a papal Mass in Rio and steps taken to prevent it in the future.

And while we are at it in Rome, let us pray that the plastic liturgical music at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in Rio with Pope Francis is viewed as a liturgical abuse and steps are being taken to prevent that in the future too.

With a review of liturgical practices for the pope on the road in foreign territory where progressive liturgist exert their compromised view of the liturgy based upon a low Christology born in the 1960's and 70's, perhaps Pope Francis was reflecting upon that when he answered a question upon Air Pope 1 as he flew back from Popacabana Beach and its antics to Rome. This is the most accurate translation of what the Holy Father had to say about the Eastern Rite Liturgies:

In the Orthodox Churches they have kept that pristine liturgy, so beautiful. We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They keep, they praise God, they adore God, they sing, time doesn’t count. God is the center, and this is a richness that I would like to say on this occasion in which you ask me this question. Once, speaking of the Western Church, of Western Europe, especially the Church that has grown most, they said this phrase to me: “Lux ex oriente, ex occidente luxus.” Consumerism, wellbeing, have done us so much harm. Instead you keep this beauty of God at the center, the reference. When one reads Dostoyevsky – I believe that for us all he must be an author to read and reread, because he has wisdom – one perceives what the Russian spirit is, the Eastern spirit. It’s something that will do us so much good. We are in need of this renewal, of this fresh air of the East, of this light of the East. John Paul II wrote it in his Letter. But so many times the luxus of the West makes us lose the horizon. I don’t know, it came to me to say this. Thank you.

Was the Holy Father reflecting upon the rah, rah, cheerleader stuff of World Youth Day and its Masses filled with plastic music and plastic cibori, the disposal generation of the west gone liturgical? Consumerism based upon a low Christology that is neither timeless or beautiful and far from the East from which the Holy Father tells us that we, meaning the Latin Rite Catholics have "lost a bit the sense of adoration" where God is not the center and consumerism and wellbeing based upon it creeps in and is the progressives point of view of liturgy par excellence that we were on the way with Pope Benedict of purging?

Did Pope Francis see in Rio what Pope Benedict wanted to purge? Pray God that the Holy Father did!

The Traditional Liturgy, what some call the Extraordinary Form, captures in a Western way, what the Eastern Way has never lost and we didn't have to lose it either except for a cabal of progressives who thought it was time for the Latin Rite Church to be more like the Protestant communions in style and liturgy rather than the Church of the east.

The EF Mass and the Eastern Rite liturgies are on the same page in terms of "splendor, beauty, adoration and God-centeredness" whereas the OF Mass as drifted off into banality and Protestant corruption what Pope Francis describes as what we have lost compared to the East. It did not have to be that way except the progressives manipulated things and made it so and are trying mightily hard to regain ground they lost under Pope Benedict.

Will Pope Francis allow it to happen? Let us hold our breath and pray that plastic doesn't return from the top down or from the bottom up!